Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Padua / Gran Teatro Geox / Italy
Concert date: 07.06.2012
Attendance: 3,000
Ticket price: €35.00 (standing)
The inexhaustible eccentric »fop«, the one who reaps the pleasure of excess, the man who has masterfully fused the thrill of rock’s shock therapy (with every single look at the stunned crowd in front of the stage) with profitability! New album, new tour. »Born Villain« is the point where Manson managed to squeeze out of himself an art-tangibility of musical substance that takes him back to the most interesting moments of his career, when he was still storming the popularity charts. The new album is wound-up and stuffed to the brim again, and it knows nothing of the heady, mournful sob-fests of the more intimate and hugely likeable album like »Eat Me, Drink Me« (2007) The tour, named »Hey Cruel World« (after the opening song of the new album), brought the band to the soil of the old continent closest to Slovenia: a renovated giant tent set up along the western Padua ring road, called Gran Teatro Geox (until recently it was still called Teatro Tenda and Foro Boario). Manson arrived on the European tour, with the first stop in Moscow, Russia, followed by St. Petersburg at the end of May, straight from his concert rituals across Australia, Taiwan, Japan….
After a fun ride under the caring wing of the travel agency Koncerti.net, the first shock therapy hit us as we arrived at the venue. Of course it didn’t measure up to the usual Manson shock therapies, but still. The police showed up with a trained sniffer dog for detecting drugs. And who did that unlucky pup single out as consumer and/or dealer? I don’t know who’s really »sniffing« and who’s really »hooked«? The pup or me.
At nine in the evening the support act opened the night. The quartet Binary. A London indie rock band with the occasional noise contour to its character. It’s made up of David Troster on lead vocals and guitar, the more abundantly overgrown Francisco Bondi on guitar, bassist and keyboardist Craig Lowe, and drummer Jake Sorbie.
Typical »new age« hipsters by looks, with spaniel eyes and Bambi postures, they used a good half hour to present their original music, which included three released singles, Torquoise, Prisioner and the newest, Modern Man. Binary most likely landed on the bill as support for Marilyn Manson in the spirit of the good old friendly pairing of Marilyn Manson and Nine Inch Nails. The sound production for Binary is handled by Sean Beavan, who is of course also known for his work with Marilyn Manson. Binary gnawed a nice chunk of their available running time off the audience with repeated long-winded intros hiding behind effects, which meant building a smeared wall of sound, usually created on a single loud strummed chord that any elderly, ailing granny could master with ease. The band made more noise than the people in the crowd by egging them on with mentions of the main man’s name, which came across as utterly pathetic and insecure. Anyway, the band would be worth catching in a different setting, where the sound, which was dismal this time, would let it come into its own, allowing a weightier analysis of the quality of its delivery and expression. If you went looking for the manliness in Binary, you’d find more of it in a single microliter of a sweat drop from Real Madrid’s prima football ballerina Cristiano Ronaldo.
For Manson no band is handy enough to be a support act. Marilyn Manson are too much of a one-off. The combination of warped, cut-up rock ‘n’ roll, which gets loosely pegged with the genre label alt metal (with strong braces in gothic and industrial metal), and the creepy scenery of stagecraft that gives the art image a glam contour too, is just too idiosyncratic, too homegrown. Manson is a sort of new »androgynously skinny« post-Bowie spider of eerie preening, carved out as a reflection of the delusions of humanity in modern times. Above all, the delusions of the USA. And it was the USA that gave Marilyn Manson to the world, so that he could, with a brazen and brilliantly bizarre intellect, expose this obscene breeding ground of quasi-morality, which runs a worldwide tyranny and legally decrees that people should kill in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit, instead of loving. Meeting Marilyn Manson eye to eye is the ideal moment for this kind of truthful revelation.
A few minutes past ten in the evening, in the packed hall, Marilyn finally appeared on stage with three companions. He left occasional touring keyboardist Chris Vrenna at home, which means more fee left over for the quartet, and also that Manson subordinated the sound structure of the shows to the creation of noise driven and shaped first and foremost by the electric guitar. So, a sharper, more direct expression of the new shows. No wonder, then, that there were no songs from the previous two »pre-Born Villain« albums in the repertoire. This time he put his faithful sidekick Twiggy Ramirez in the guitarist’s spot, while on his right stood the fresh member of the band, bassist Fred Sablan. The latter replaced Andy Gerold in the lineup in 2010. At the start of this year drummer Jason Sutter joined too. He’s an exceptionally experienced and seasoned old tomcat who has worked over his career with The Rembrandts, Smash Mouth, Soundgarden, New York Dolls and, for a very short time, even AOR legends Foreigner.
The lover of bizarre nightlife hit straight in with the first song from the new album, Hey, Cruel World… A sea of strobes pours down, a cloud of fog tears loose. Twiggy is a surprising sight, with a huge head mask of an evil version of Elmer. The opener unfolds in a whiff of proper Manson scenery, but without excess pomp, and Hello, Cruel World… doesn’t stir up the expected madness in the hall, which means the new songs haven’t quite caught on in the ears of our western neighbors yet . But already the second, Disposable Teens, and especially The Love Song right after it, string together a whole new mood. In fact, in those moments the hall instantly turned into a boiling cauldron, with no room for claustrophobes and/or those of you who handle poorly the intense vice grip of an hour and a half of squeezing that takes your breath away and wipes out the borders of sound judgment. The crowd lost it. Everyone surfacing on their backs. Singing the verses, enthusiastic shoving toward the front row, even at the price of broken teeth, where Manson kept shaking hands with the audience all through the show.
No need to point out that Manson was born to be put on a stage. He just takes it over, melts into it as if he’d been born with his chosen prop. This time the masquerade in terms of »outfit« changes didn’t come across so much, since Marilyn Manson and company suffered in a hellish heat created by the spotlights and the black canvas roof of the hall. The sweating seemed to have no end. Manson twice looked theatrically toward bassist Sablan as if to say he could barely stand the heat, and consequently kept vanishing from the stage for short breaks to cool his head. Marilyn Manson paid little attention to the character of the outfits this time, since while enduring the severe swelter he strove to survive an hour and three quarters with as little junk on him as possible, so he also very quickly flung off helmets, hats, Gestapo caps etc…
The cheeky boy, the born »bad man« (»Born Villain«), provoked again with the usual hurling of mic stands, mics and all, deep into the heart of the stage, gleefully grabbed his crotch (Pistol Whipped), and aimed a whole pleiad of fast-changing grimaces of the most varied theatrically conjured feelings at the audience. Manson revels in the theater he creates, revels in feeding off the energy he gets back from the frenzied crowd. In the front rows there were quite a few »fake«, let’s say prettier »spare« Mansons, and on top of that people had put on all sorts of inventions: gothic veils, artificial lenses, powders, heaps of makeup and fake nails in the most eye-searingly irritating shades. The atmosphere was fantastic. Despite the unbearable conditions in the front rows, dictated by the inexhaustible hot-blooded Italian temperament, with merciless trampling and shoving.
Considering that Manson’s figure and voice take up 90% of the band’s whole performance, that everything revolves around him, that he’s the absolutely central figure of every show, the excellent playing of the other three in the quartet shouldn’t be overlooked. Ramirez astounded with his feel for building a mocking, scary, noisily droning guitar backdrop, which firmly held the core of the accompaniment into which Manson’s vocal performance settled, mostly run through a distortion effect, with no shortage of piercing, schizophrenically frenetic vocal outbursts. The quartet easily commanded the stage and the three-thousand-strong crowd, which diligently ate out of his hand the whole way through. Sound-wise, the balance of the instruments was very fitting if you listened to the show from at least 20 m or farther from the stage. Up front there was no room for those who had come just to listen, because they heard precious little. The sound carried far, far forward this time and cheated mainly those standing in the front rows. Standing? Going wild!
With a bestial performance of a bestial repertoire presenting the new »Born Villain« songs, which fit superbly with the rest of the material, leaning especially toward the middle and early periods of Manson’s musical career, which means only one thing. True fans of his music definitely got their money’s worth. Then the inclusion of the famous »Antichrist Superstar« standards in the closing part of the show poured oil on the fire, crowned, as expected, in the encore by the song Antichrist Superstar with its tall standing lectern. Here come the obligatory covers of hits by Depeche Mode (Personal Jesus) and Eurythmics (Sweet Dreams), which close the regular set. Interestingly, Manson wrapped up the show without playing the song that was left at the tail end of the repertoire, Murders Are Getting Prettier Every Day, so the total running time came to an hour and forty minutes. Why that song was cut isn’t clear. Perhaps because of a lower fee the musicians got for the leg of the tour covering Romance-language countries, which I doubt. More likely the hellish heat was behind the decision. Instead of that song we consoled ourselves with the taped outro, yet another (excellent new cover directed by Marilyn Manson, to be precise a pop hit from the early seventies called You’re So Vain by Carly Simon.
An immensely intense concert experience with a gothic devil who, with bizarreness, tries in a highly intelligent way to open the eyes of the masses. He does it by deliberately using his own body to effectively expose the placed ideas expressed by his musical artistry and the brilliant perceptiveness of his musical character. Manson’s artistry is beyond dispute. Even after the eighth studio album and a new concert experience, still not. The man is by no means finished; his magazines stay full of bizarre yet cunningly sparkling ideas, squashed together in a unique manner that gives this artist’s entity a special place on the rock map. No survivors in Beelzebub’s land this time either.
Transport in the bosom of an always safe and pleasant atmosphere was once again taken care of by the Koncerti.net travel agency, led by its fearless boss and sturdy rock enthusiast, Concert Freak!
Setlist
Suspiria (taped intro)
1. Hey, Cruel World…
2. Disposable Teens
3. The Love Song
4. No Reflection
5. mOBSCENE
6. The Dope Show(with “Coma Black” intro)
7. Slo-Mo-Tion
8. Rock Is Dead
9. Personal Jesus
10. Pistol Whipped
11. Tourniquet
12. Irresponsible Hate Anthem
13. Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)
–encore—
14. Antichrist Superstar
15. The Beautiful People
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