Manson's no stranger to resurrection or reinvention. Every successive album has seen hard rock's smartest and savviest villain reborn in some manner. He went from the apocalyptic industrial metal of 1996's now classic Antichrist Superstar to the theatrical glam dream of Mechanical Animals. He came off the Holy Wood cross and became brutally burlesque for The Golden Age of Grotesque and then he ventured inside himself for Eat Me, Drink Me and The High End of Low.
Now, he's arrived at the aptly titled Born Villain. And thank god for that as due to the ill-advised crooning on Eat Me, Drink Me, to the hit-and-miss The High End Of Low, Manson had been treading water. The God of Fuck was in serious danger of becoming The God of Fuck-All.
There's thankfully none of that lighters-in-the-air singy nonsense of the last two records. Lead single 'No Reflection' lays things out nicely. Plenty of crunchy guitar, Manson's wails and croaks, waves of guitar, guns, razors, death, pain and some classic/terrible MM puns ("This will hurt you worse than me/ I'm weak, seven days, I'm weak").
Elsewhere, they gleefully plough that glam-metal-industrial-rock furrow that gave the group that classic late-'90s trilogy of albums, granted without any of that famous in-your-face shock value nor the same quality of tunes. It starts strongly, opener 'Hey, Cruel World' having a nicely shouty chorus built for some fist-pumping live performances ("We don't need your faith / We've got fucking fate / Fate! / Fate! / Fate!")
The half-spoken 'The Gardener' bounces along like a demented poetry reading with some good old-fashioned claims to outsiderdom ("I'm not man enough to be human / But I'm trying to fit in / And I'm learning to fa-fa-fake it"). 'Overneath The Path Of Misery' opens with a delightfully portentous reading from Macbeth's "sound and fury" soliloquy before culminating in some ear-splitting squeals.
Johnny Depp (yes the same fella who is best known as Captain Jack Sparrow) appears on a pointless cover of Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain' tacked on as a bonus track. Has Manson ever recorded a decent cover apart from the better-than-the-original 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)'?
There's some filler, some woefully underwritten tracks and some complete guff, and while Born Villain doesn't have anything near as wonderful as 2009's best rock moment 'Arma...geddon', it's much, much more fun than The High End of Low as a whole. Yeah, the original trilogy (Antichrist Superstar, Mechanical Animals & Holy Wood) remains untouched and perhaps a decade of diminishing returns has nudged us to think of this record kindly, but all-in-all Manson and friends have clawed back enough of that primal energy that made MM such a draw.
In the end if I were to rate it, the new Manson brainchild will get a 4 out of 5.
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