Next month
Marilyn Manson will release his first album since 2009’s The High End of Low. I’ll be honest, I’m not entirely familiar with
his output post-The Golden Age of
Grotesque and haven’t listened to him properly since I was 18 which was a
depressing amount of years ago. So my reason for reviewing
this single is the wave of nostalgia that overtook me when I saw his name in my
inbox. I was the kid in school with Marilyn Manson and Deftones patches on her
schoolbag. I got his albums the day they came out and watched his visually
eye-popping music videos premiere on MTV2.
No Reflection is an
extremely catchy, rhythm-driven single that wears its influences on its sleeve.
It manages to maintain a balance between the dark atmospherics you come to
expect from industrial-tinged music and a clean, eighties-informed sound; this
song is extremely easy to both bang your head to and dance to as well. There’s
a riff here – make no mistake, this is not a pop song by any stretch of the
imagination – but there is a foundation that lies outwith the traditional
Manson oeuvre. In discussing the upcoming album the main man himself says that
“it sort of sounds like what I listened to before I made records – Killing
Joke, Joy Division, Revolting Cocks, Bauhaus, Birthday Party...” and the two
key bands to pick up from that list are Joy Division and Bauhaus. What is built
on this foundation is an anthem that heralds a potential return to form for the
goth rocker: reminiscent of an Antichrist
Superstar-era Marilyn Manson, this is something the fans have been waiting
for an awfully long time. As the lead single from the up-coming album, No Reflection is a promising indicator.
No Reflection is out
now on Cooking Vinyl.
LD
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