REVIEW: Marilyn Manson, The Last Tour on Earth (Interscope)
- Michelle Aguilar
Ok, I'll admit that I came pretty late to the Marilyn Manson dope show. Old fart that I am, I went for months in 1996 seeing these 14-year-olds hanging around my little, overpriced, super-intellectual Massachusetts college town. They'd be loitering outside my favorite music store or outside Starbucks, with their hair dyed raven black or bright red, wearing chain-link wallets on their baggy camoflage pants and their black tee-shirts that spelled out "Marilyn Manson" in fonts that reminded me, old fart that I am, of Misfits tee-shirts.
"Who the heck is this Marilyn Manson guy anyway?" I'd ask myself. Just when I thought I'd finally figured it out - repetitive, Trent Reznor-influenced industrial death metal; a sort of O-Negative lite; a Christian Death with a slightly better sense of humor - 1998's Mechanical Animals proved me and others wrong. Suddenly everybody started talking about Manson in the same breath with Bowie and Ozzy and Alice. And now we have this new album, "The Last Tour on Earth."
This collection of live performances from Manson's Midwestern tour in 1998 and 1999, builds on the promises hinted at in Mechanical Animals, stripping away even more of Reznor's formidable wall of industrial metal guitars that made 1996's Antichrist Superstar sound like the band was drowning in a pool of its own soulless sludge. Instead, the band live opts for even more Bowie-esque glam, with snarly but sexy guitar riffs that would make Mick Ronson's day. This new sound lends an unexpected exuberance to a live album supposedly full of jaded, neo-Satan metal anthems.
If there's one thing those '70s glam boys knew, it was that bigger is better. Many of the songs The Last Tour on Earth subscribe to that philosophy. "Rock is Dead" and "Irresponsible Hate Anthem," the way they're played here, with trebly distorted guitars that at times sound almost like horns, evoke the grandiose guitar riffs of a modern-day Black Sabbath. "The Last Day on Earth," which relies on sad acoustic guitar and lonely electric piano, recalls David Bowie's more epic moments on "Hunky Dory," when he would make his songs sound like he was singing from the tundras of Antarctica.
The melodic melodramas of glam are here too, in the jaded, wormhole-inside-the-glory-of-success delivery of Manson hits like "The Dope Show" and "I Don't Like The Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)." These songs get slow, anthemic treatments that sound both huge and sparse at the same time. Even the originally very muddled hit, "Sweet Dreams" has this odd contradiction of sound that surprisingly recalls Bauhaus. In fact, there are a number of songs in the Manson set that live, sound a rather bit like live Bauhaus, with Manson at times even copping Peter Murphy's trademark short gasping/screaming vocal style that, bless his red-velvet-lined heart, always sounded like a giant bird being strangled ten seconds at a time. "Inauguration of the Mechanical Christ" and "The Last Day on Earth" have moments that sound like musical variations on Bauhaus' "Kick in the Eye." And while we on the topic of Brit-punk, the wanly performed "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)" wavers between Alice Cooper and the Gang of Four, leaning a lot more towards Gang of Four than I would have ever expected from a band that started out in the death-metal cd bins.
The typical Manson trademark theatrics are still here - cop-baiting, drug-extolling, fan-bashing and cartoonish cynicism - which have made him the latest gadfly for The Good People of America, the parents of all those pasty-faced, black-garbed children hanging outside my Starbucks. They love Manson, as you can plainly hear in the background throughout. You can almost hear how young they must be, how excited they are at the sense of being inside something momentous, something dangerous, even if what they're participating in is in reality a pre-packaged light and magic show; a fact that of course, Manson himself would be the first to tell you.
But the songs are strong, tight, and somehow bigger than many of the studio versions. I have to admit that for the first time, I was tempted to want to see a Marilyn Manson concert. Perhaps this is because the live recordings somehow manage to communicate the excitement, the sheer spectacle surrounding a Manson show, despite the fact that the tracks are disjointed and clearly not from a single, continuous performance.
The spectacle does have an occasional downside, however. Sometimes the theatrics are too much, with Manson spending a lot of time in his song introductions inveighing about incidents in specific cities with "the pigs" and fundamentalist religious types about which we can only speculate. Still, as someone who was initially fooled (and not all that impressed) with the industrial-metal stylings of Smells Like Children and Antichrist Superstar, I was pleasantly surprised by The Last Tour on Earth. This live album accomplishes a rare feat - preserving the basic integrity of original studio recordings, while at the same time giving them a sense of momentum, urgency and excitement that so many live albums fail to communicate.
Given that many tour albums are so often just pale, poorly realized versions of the lusher studio album the artist was out pimping, it is refreshing to hear a live recording with attitude, with performances that set out to make me a believer.
