Perhaps to prepare fans for their next release, Marilyn Manson have decided to release a five-track EP of dance remixes and live songs. The group does show that they have what it takes to come up with sometimes interesting dance makeovers of popular songs (such as "The Horrible People," a reworking of their hit "The Beautiful People"), but the originals are better and definitive. You'll also find a pair of live tracks, "Dried Up, Tied and Dead to the World" and "Antichrist Superstar," which catch the band in all of their shock-rock glory. And closing the mini-album is a mellow acoustic piece (consisting of just guitar and voice, with a few sound effects here and there) entitled "Man That You Fear," which is a departure from their usual sound.

A year on from Portrait of an American Family, Marilyn Manson released the stopgap EP Smells Like Children. Where the full-length debut showed sparks of character and invention beneath industrial metal sludge, Smells Like Children is a smartly crafted horror show, filled with vulgarity, ugliness, goth freaks, and sideshow scares. Manson wisely chose to heighten his cartoonish personality with the EP. Most of the record is devoted to spoken words and samples, all designed to push to the outrage buttons of middle America. Between those sonic collages arrives one new song, retitled remixes of Portrait songs - "Kiddie Grinder," "Everlasting Cocksucker," "Dance of the Dope Hats," "White Trash" - and three covers ("Sweet Dreams," "I Put a Spell on You," "Rock 'n' Roll Nigger"), all given a trademark spooky makeover…

Marilyn Manson started out as a depraved, marginally talented group of freaks that played a caustic but undeveloped brand of metallic industrial noise. Then Trent Reznor stepped into the studio for seven months with the band, and Manson emerged with the most intense, visceral, mechanical metal album since The Downward Spiral. Antichrist Superstar is a horror-house of grisly atrocities that stains as indelibly as a bathful of warm blood. Brooding rhythms collide with corrosive samples and buzzsaw guitar riffs, while vocalist Marilyn croons irresistible melodies in the voice of a vagrant regurgitating broken light-bulb shards. Essential listening, regardless of how much input Reznor had.

The High End of Low is the seventh studio album by Marilyn Manson. Manson first began work on the album with guitarist Tim Sköld. However, Sköld left the band when the vocalist reunited with former bassist Twiggy Ramirez. The album was produced by Manson and Twiggy (who dropped the Ramirez moniker) along with former Nine Inch Nails co-producer and keyboardist Chris Vrenna, as well as Antichrist Superstar (1996) and Mechanical Animals (1998) co-producer Sean Beavan. It was the last album to feature the band's long-time drummer Ginger Fish. The record received mixed reviews from music critics, with several publications praising it as their best album since Mechanical Animals; although others were critical of both its length and more personal lyrical themes…

It's been a long time since Marilyn Manson truly seemed like a transgressive force, but when you spend a lifetime crafting a persona as a rock & roll boogeyman, it's not only hard to shake that image, it's unlikely that you'd want to shake it. Manson has never shown any indication that he's wanted to change, which somehow came as a surprise to his betrothed, burlesque diva Dita Von Teese, who according to published reports in the wake of their divorce seemed shocked, shocked that Manson wanted to stay up late and take drugs, the kind of eternally adolescent behavior that only rock & roll stars can get away with as they approach 40. Better for Marilyn to sever that marriage and turn toward a true teenager: Evan Rachel Wood, the blandly pretty star of Thirteen who provided MM with a brand-new muse for Eat Me, Drink Me, his sixth studio album…

In 2000, Marilyn Manson not only was recovering from his fans' rejection of Mechanical Animals, he was scarred from Columbine and, worst of all, he was no longer America's demon dog. What was Brian Warner to do, standing on such uneasy ground? As a smart man and savvy marketer, he knew that it was time to consolidate his strengths, blend Omega with Antichrist Superstar, and return with a harsh, controversial, operatic epic: a vulgar concept album to seduce his core audiences of alienated teens and cultural cops. The resulting album, Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death), is intended as the third part of the trilogy beginning with Antichrist Superstar, and its convoluted story line is fairly autobiographical, but the amazing thing isn't the story - it's that he figured out to meld the hooks and subtle sonic shading of Mechanical Animals with the ugly, neo-industrial metallicisms of Antichrist…

Timing is everything in pop music, and Marilyn Manson hit a zeitgeist in the mid-'90s with Antichrist Superstar, riding the post-alternative wave to the top of the charts with his dark, arty, industrial metal. He was a proud shock artist and a great interview, one of the few rockers of his time who stood his own against his attackers by offering articulate, informed counterarguments to their blustering rage. Like any shock rocker, though, the novelty wears thin fast, and what was once scary turns into self-parody. Manson, no stranger to rock history, attempted to circumvent this by turning quickly to the left with the glam-soaked Mechanical Animals, but in doing so he lost huge portions of his audience, and by the time he returned to scary industrial metal form on Holy Wood in 2000, he seemed out of date and few critics or fans paid attention…

Not only is The Nightmare Before Christmas one of the best musicals of the past two decades; it may well be Danny Elfman's masterpiece, successfully integrating his main influences (from Cab Calloway to Nino Rota) into a fantastic whole. The first disc of this reissue features the original soundtrack, its songs still teetering between dark humor and poetic flights of fancy; this so-called kids' music is at least as sophisticated and skilled as anything you're likely to hear on Broadway. The second disc includes demo versions of four songs on which Elfman plays and sings everything, and five new covers of some of Nightmare's best-loved songs. Marilyn Manson successfully applies his spooky Weimar-circus style on "This Is Halloween" while Panic! At the Disco's lushly orchestrated take on the same tune is closer to the original. Fiona Apple's poignant "Sally's Song" is enhanced by very nice string charts, and She Wants Revenge does a disco take on "Kidnap the Sandy Claws." Best perhaps is Fall Out Boy's cover of "What's This?" which sounds like an unexpected cross between the Beach Boys and Queen. A highly recommended set.

Marilyn Manson returns with his eleventh studio album We Are Chaos via Loma Vista Recordings. Co-produced by Manson and Grammy Award winner Shooter Jennings [Brandi Carlile, Tanya Tucker], the ten-track opus was written, recorded, and finished before the global pandemic.

The soundtrack to David Lynch's brilliant Lost Highway highlights the evocative gothic nightmares of producer Trent Reznor, whose Nine Inch Nails contribute the single "The Perfect Drug." Along with material from longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, the set also includes new music from the Smashing Pumpkins, Marilyn Manson and Lou Reed, who offers a taut cover of the Doc Pomus classic "This Magic Moment."