Marilyn Manson
Holy Wood

THE REVIEW

The Reverend concludes with this album the trilogy that began in '96 with Antichrist Superstar and continued in '98 with Mechanical Animals.
Holy Wood, or the sacred wood on which Christ was crucified, the fifth endeavor of Marilyn Manson is a dark, gloomy, angry album with gothic-style atmospheres that needs to be listened to with great attention before being judged.

This work is a concept album divided into 4 parts (In The Shadow, The Androgyne, Of Red Earth, and The Fallen) and is not just a collection of songs, but also the narration of a story that has as its protagonist Adam Cadmon (a symbolic reference made by Manson to the first man on earth), a young man who wants to be part of a perfect world but then realizes that it is not as he expected and rebels, eventually being metaphorically killed by the media, in the sense of becoming nothing more than another product created to be commercialized. Marilyn Manson uses this story as a pretext to criticize today's society, religion, and politics.

But let's talk about the 19 songs that make up the CD. Even before inserting the CD into the player, on the cover, he appears in a crucifix pose without a jaw, and on the back, a close-up of him, always jawless, behind the symbol of the devil (who knows how all the narrow-minded bigoted critics must have been scared...). The journey into MM's dark world opens with the gloomy "GodEatGod" and concludes with "Count To Six And Die," where it seems that Manson is speaking of a girl with a gun pointed at her mouth about to shoot. The album is a mix of industrial and gothic atmospheres with the shouted anger of "The Love Song," "Burning Flag," "Disposable Teens" (very similar to "The Beautiful People"), and "The Fight Song" (the last 2 mentioned were also singles), with songs with very hypnotic riffs like "Cruci-fiction in Space," with sad but beautiful slow rock like in "Coma Black" and "A Place In The Dirt" and strange but true, even with almost pop songs like the beautiful "Lamb Of God" or "The Death Song" (because as he himself said: if I want to make a song about a revolution and I want people to sing it, it must be catchy) and semi-acoustic like "The Fall Of Adam," "Count To Six And Die," and "In The Shadow Of The Valley Of Death." This last one can be defined as the title track, I really like the slow acoustic pace with the arrival towards the end of the percussion that makes it so melancholic and beautiful. MM has inserted various hidden messages, from "Death Valley," that is, the valley of the famous (a kind of cursed Hollywood), to the "flies," which I believe are the mass media that swarm like flies on anyone trying to do something different and commodify them. An album different from the glam-rock of the previous Mechanical Animals and very different from the catchy electronic-rock of the successor The Golden Age Of Grotesque. This does not mean that it is the peak of innovation (on the contrary...) but still, this CD is very varied and also complete.

Putting aside the discussions about his image (some may like it and some may not, but it has always been so), this (in my opinion great and somewhat underrated) album represents, in my view, the more introverted side of Antichrist Superstar.