At long last, Ziggy Stardust took over America. It just took him longer than he expected.
I have to say first of all that I'm always still surprised at how long it took Mr. Manson and company to get good. Trent Reznor being one of the sharper producers and arrangers out there, I was always deeply bemused at how uniformly boring the early releases were. And that it took corp rock semi-hack Michael Beinhorn to do the production job right this time out is even more surprising, but hey, it is, with a huge sound throughout, very lush, pristene and indeed mechanical, everything connecting just as it should.
But more to the point, as I intimate above, this is essentially Bowie, an angrier American Bowie, sure, but still Bowie. Cannily, Brian Warner decided to amalgamate all the various guises of the Thin White Duke from the seventies and fit it on one album, rather than just being one part of one facet. Quite why nobody figured this one out before is one of those great mysteries, but now that's been done, let's see what happens next.
So we have everything from the "Five Years" intro to the album song, namely "Great Big White World," as the alien regards the globe below, only even more amped up and powered out, Twiggy Ramirez's guitar ripping apart things perfectly, to "The Dope Show" revisiting "Diamond Dogs," pulled out from the oxygen tent and rebuffed, to "I Don't Like the Drugs but the Drugs Like Me," which is "Fame" with different lyrics and if it tries to hide it doesn't do a very good job, and so forth. "Moonage Daydream" riffs, "Subterreaneans" keyboards, "Scary Monsters" drumbeats, it's all here and nicely mushed together and cranked up to ten, I would have to say. And I do. Whether or not this is meant to be Warner's confession that the rock life isn't what it's cracked up to be (gee, what a surprise -- it takes this former music journalist that long to figure it out?) is irrelevant, because I don't hear his words, I hear the pose and the music, and that I love.
Admittedly, this isn't the only thing going on in this album. Arena-rock drums pounding down from the heights, acoustic guitars for the heck of it in the middle of the title track and elsewhere, and other things borrowed from…uh…those who borrowed from Bowie. Thus I hear Gary Numan everywhere, being the logical extension of Bowie's alienated alien avatar status, and more than a little Andrew Eldritch at points, if not quite as smart, not to mention Adam Ant drums at strategic locations. And a little bit of Pink Floyd circa Animals and The Wall, but thankfully no more than that, because a little can go a long way.
I'll nominate "I Want to Disappear" as the best track myself. Another "Diamond Dogs" nod with the fake live audience, a tech-heavy catchy-as-hell song and a "HEY!" chorus that finally turns Gary Glitter into the Laibach of Marilyn Manson's dreams. Implied cinematography by Riefenstahl, gold suits and mascara as a bonus. That works.
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