Perhaps Manson’s failing is that he comes at the world from all angles: musician, visual artist, author, director, producer; he paints too many canvases with too wide of a brush, and it sometimes leaves the masses running for shelter. Then again, maybe that’s the point.

Manson’s real prominence as a celebrity figure began in ’96 with the release of the Trent Reznor-produced Antichrist Superstar—a dark, dissonant journey through societal loathing and failed rebellion that earned Manson and Co. as many fans as sworn enemies. The following album pushed the envelope in a completely different direction; ’98s Mechanical Animals saw Manson creating a parody of himself (the character Omega, a hollow, androgynous figure who is treated more like a product than a person) in an attempt to make people re-examine the notion of celebrity in modern culture. Manson also took the opportunity to jettison the Mininstry-esque industrial grind in favor of a more melodic, vocal-oriented sound—all of which played to the album’s larger themes of rebellion dissolving into merchandising.

Last fall, Manson stepped back into the public eye with the release of Holy Wood (In the Shadow of the Valley of Death). Emerging from his post-Columbine seclusion in the Hollywood Hills, Manson, as he puts it, “came out swinging.” Thematically, the new album completes the Antichrist/Animals trilogy—a trilogy that actually begins with Holy Wood, followed by Animals and ends with Antichrist. Holy Wood is centered around Adam—a thinly veiled portrait of a young Manson—an individual determined to change the world that he feels has rejected and discarded him. Sonically, the album draws on both the intensity and the melody of its two predecessors with, at times, more bombast, volume and moments of sincere vulnerability. (Numerous parallels can also be culled from the three albums, such as the reflexive significance of the 12/8 groove from “The Beautiful People” that resurfaces in both “Rock is Dead” and “Disposable Teens.”) Holy Wood comes across as a thoroughly modern hybrid of 21st century production, early electronic music and every bit of rock ’n’ roll suicide from the Rolling Stones to Sisters of Mercy.

To create his latest opus, Manson enlisted the help of Nitzer Ebb alumni/programmer Bon Harris and producer/engineer Dave Sardy, who had worked with Manson on the band’s live album, The Last Tour on Earth, as well as some soundtrack contributions. The recording process began in the fall of ’99 at Manson’s home studio in the Hollywood Hills. Manson, Harris and the rest of the band spent several months in pre-production, creating demos and experimenting with every instrument and noisemaker they could get their hands on. Harris handled all of the sequencing and tracking, which was done on Manson’s Pro Tools/Logic rig. After the band had assembled a sizable amount of material, Sardy was then asked to come aboard to engineer and co-produce the effort with Manson.

“They had about 60 songs,” Sardy explains with a laugh. “I mean, they write on the road, they write every minute of every day. They take a Pro Tools rig with them on the road and write while they’re touring. Manson had his back house set up like a project studio, and some of the vocals were done there. There was a lot of music when I got involved. They had been working with a programmer, Bon Harris. They had been kind of doing demos with him and working on stuff and just going crazy in his pool house for a bunch of months. And then I got involved and just kind of helped go through the process of which songs they wanted to record and which ones to push further.”

Sardy and Manson were impressed with how tight the band had become in the past couple of years and wanted to incorporate a more performance-driven approach in the recording of Holy Wood. “Having done the live record together,” Sardy continues, “we were blown away by how good the band sounded live. We had been A/B’ing between the live versions and the album versions, and the excitement of the live versions was just outrageous. We definitely tried to push more of a performance approach, as opposed to all electronic. And it’s just the natural evolution for any touring band; you go out on the road for a bunch of years, and you’re just going to get really good. There’s no way around it. That was a goal of both Manson and me; we wanted to make a very electronic-sounding record but a very organic record—take organic sounds and process them and use performances, as opposed to all sequencing and MIDI.”

Reprinted with permission from Magazine, March, 2001
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