Well, the new manson album is here – The Pale Emperor.

One of the reasons I love manson is that, unike some of the other talented artists I follow <cough>Tool</cough>, he’s fairly prolific and consistent – he releases a new album every year or two.

One consequence is that his albums can be a bit hit-and-miss. He doesn’t do ‘bad’ albums, per se, but I think you can rank his albums in 3 categories: ‘good’, ‘great’, and ‘exemplary’. The rankings will obviously vary by the individual, but for me the most brilliant album is easily Antichrist Superstar and his most hit-and-miss efforts are Eat Me, Drink Me and Golden Age Of The Grotesque. These are both good albums in their own right and both include awesome tracks – I adore the title track of Eat Me, Drink Me, and Golden Age includes the fantastic ‘use your fist and not your mouth’, but I’m talking about the albums overall, and the great albums are more than the sum of their parts.

I’m up to the last track on The Pale Emperor now, and my first impressions are really positive – This will go into the ‘great’ category right away.

I’m looking back over at track listings of his discography and trying to compare it. It’s not an easy task. I hear influences from a lot of his previous work. In particular I hear the ‘crooning’ style he developed in Eat Me, Drink Me, but this is much more “rocky” and “classic manson” than that – it’s a great combination.

…more than a decade later (2026, the above was written in 2015), and I came across this unpublished article. I’m not sure why I didn’t publish it. I think I intended to go on and do a more in-depth look at the discography, but clearly I got sidetracked with something else.

It’s interesting to me that I wrote this right on the very first playthrough of The Pale Emperor. It holds true – I still consider it one of Manson’s best albums. It might even be top 3. Go give it a listen!