About WE ARE CHAOS by Marilyn Manson Album
We Are Chaos (stylized in all caps) is the eleventh studio album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on September 11, 2020 by Loma Vista Recordings and Concord Music. It was produced by Manson himself and Shooter Jennings. The title track and "Don't Chase the Dead" were both issued as singles. The album was a critical and commercial success upon release, garnering mostly positive reviews and becoming their first number one album in Portugal, as well as their first number one album in Australia since 1998's Mechanical Animals. In March 2019, Marilyn Manson announced he had nearly finished recording the band's next studio album, and that country musician Shooter Jennings was involved. The two were introduced by the producers of Sons of Anarchy in 2013, who asked them to compose a song for the finale of the sixth season of the television series. This collaboration, "Jesus, My Sweet Brother", was performed live once that same year, but remains unreleased, with Manson saying that neither he or Jennings were happy with "the direction that wanted us to go in". Instead, Manson portrayed a character in the subsequent season of Sons of Anarchy, and recorded two albums with producer Tyler Bates: 2015's The Pale Emperor and 2017's Heaven Upside Down. Manson and Jennings also collaborated on a cover of David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)" for Jennings's 2016 album Countach (For Giorgio). In 2019, drummer Gil Sharone, who performed on The Pale Emperor and Heaven Upside Down, announced he was leaving the band to pursue other projects, with former Black Flag drummer Brandon Pertzborn hired as his replacement. It was later revealed that Bates was no longer involved with the group, and that their next album would be produced by Jennings and feature contributions from his drummer Jamie Douglass. Pertzborn and the band's touring guitarist, Paul Wiley, were also confirmed to perform on the forthcoming album. The band released their cover of The Doors song "The End" on streaming music services on November 22, 2019. It was recorded as the theme music for the upcoming miniseries The Stand – based on the Stephen King novel of the same name – in which Manson is set to appear as "The Trashcan Man". Manson said recording the cover of "The End" informed the approach taken in recording the album, in that it "started us exploring different things. very talented in so many ways, and working with him is very fluid. We have a totally different collaborative style than I did on the last two records. Sometimes Shooter will already be doing something that I was going to suggest. We lock brains a lot together." The album was recorded in several studios, with Manson saying that each musician's touring commitments made it "difficult to find time when we could work together", saying the two would "shift between working in his studio, my studio, another studio that could accommodate initially entire band, which includes strings and drums and everything." His vocals for the album were recorded late at night, with Manson saying that "Shooter found that my peak hour for singing was 3 a.m. I'm sure that's probably because it's the full range of rasp that comes out of my voice, but also just the creative circle that we go through, because we spent a lot of times talking when we're making the songs and what we wanted them to be, what we wanted to shape them into." Recording for the album began some 18 months prior to January 2020, the month it was completed. That same month, live bassist Juan Alderete was involved in a bicycle accident which left him with a diffuse axonal injury, a type of traumatic brain injury. A GoFundMe page was created to help cover the cost of his medical expenses. Alderete is credited with performing bass on the album. Four months later, Manson and Jennings confirmed the album was complete, with both calling it a "masterpiece". Manson described We Are Chaos as a concept album, saying it intentionally included ten songs so that "it would be treated, in the traditional sense, of how an LP works. How there's a Side A and a Side B", noting the mood and tone of the album changes drastically after the fifth track. He described Elton John and Bernie Taupin as influences on its composition, saying that he and Jennings "started writing on piano and with vocals, and it seemed great for both of us to find a spot where my voice and piano sounded really different. And it seemed like I could really go places that I had not gone before. Different keys, or different rhythms, or just different elements and ideas." Elaborating on this point, he said fans would be "pleasantly surprised at how it sounds! A lot of people like to refer to style of music as 'country', but I regard it more as 'southern'. I suppose that also drags in a bit of the Stones, in a way… There's a lot of piano, though not necessarily Elton John piano. Maybe more 'Bennie and the Jets' piano. Let's just call it Shooter Jennings piano!". Manson initially suggested the album could be self-titled, saying: "I'm in a mode in life where I wanted to tell stories with this record, and it's sort of like a wax museum of my thoughts, a study of the chamber of horrors in my head. All the romance and hope you can have in the world, here in the End Times where it can be a different kind of apocalypse for each person listening to the record. I tried to paint it with words, and Shooter with sounds, so you can see and hear all of your longing, your passion and despair. That's sort of a dramatic explanation of it. But it is full of drama. I wouldn't compare it to any of my other records, but you hear a bit of everything—it's like I've focused everything into one spot, finally." The record was originally scheduled to be released in mid-2020, but this was rescheduled after the cancellation of the band's appearance as the opening act on Ozzy Osbourne's No More Tours II series, a North American tour beginning in May 2020. The tour was cancelled when Osbourne was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. Manson created the artwork for the album, a watercolor self-portrait entitled Infinite Darkness. Several editions of the record were issued, including CD and cassette versions, as well as numerous vinyl options: a picture disc, a pink-colored vinyl, and a red, black and blue-spattered vinyl. The latter was bundled with a limited edition 7" vinyl single of lead single "We Are Chaos", containing an exclusive remix as a B-side. A version of the CD album containing two bonus tracks – acoustic versions of "We Are Chaos" and "Broken Needle" – were available in brick and mortar stores, with these songs also appearing as bonuses on Japanese editions of the record. Target stores in North America were supplied with an exclusive "translucent black ice" marbled edition of the vinyl containing a limited edition art print. The title track was issued as the lead single from the record on July 29, 2020, alongside details of the album including its cover and track list. A music video for the song, which was directed, photographed and edited by Matt Mahurin while in quarantine due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was released the same day. On September 8, Manson revealed in an interview that he will shoot a music video for the song "Don't Chase the Dead". The track was released two days later, a day before the album release. On September 24, the music video for the second single, featuring actor Norman Reedus and photographer Lindsay Usich, was released. Upon release, the album received mostly positive reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album has an average score of 77 based on 11 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews", the highest score for any of the band's albums. Album of the Year collected 15 reviews and calculated an average of 78 out of 100. Aggregator AnyDecentMusic? gave the album 7.9 out of 10, based on their assessment of the critical consensus. Consequence of Sound said the production, musicianship and songwriting found on the album was among the best of the band's entire discography. Clash described it as a concise record, noting the absence of filler, and said that despite being disparate musicians, Manson and Jennings have "created, if not perfected, a rousing ballad of angst for the Millennials." NME also complimented the collaboration between the two, praising Manson for focusing more on songwriting than "spectacle" with the album's lyrics while saying that Jennings's production resulted in the record being a "stately and varied listen with subtlety to match the spookiness." They went on to describe it as Manson's "most human work so far." Similarly, Metal Hammer described the lyrics on the record as "more wounded and emotionally raw than ever been", while Kerrang! said the production evokes a "sense of stateliness at times" and a "sleazy rock club stench at others", and complimented Manson's "razor-sharp lyrical tongue". They went on to say of the album: "It's not pared back, but WE ARE CHAOS is a less immediately antagonistic and forward prospect than recent output. But that's a good thing that's been mastered to darkly brilliant effect here. Unexpected, bold and artistic, Manson remains an artist it is dangerous to underestimate." Both Cleveland.com and The Oakland Press dubbed it the album of the week. Industry forecasters predicted the record was on course to debut in the United States with pure album sales of between 20,000 and 22,000 copies, with an additional 2,000 to 5,000 units as a result of streaming and album-equivalent units. It went on to debut as the highest-selling album of the week based on pure sales. Despite this, it entered in the lower portion of the top ten of the Billboard 200, primarily as a result of a lack of streaming activity. The record debuted at number eight on the Billboard 200 with 32,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, becoming Manson's tenth top ten album. The recorded units included 28,000 traditional album sales, 3,000 streaming-equivalent units (or 4 million on-demand streams of album tracks), and less than 1,000 track-equivalent units (sales of individual tracks). The album sold an additional 6,775 traditional copies on its second week in the US. Similarly, We Are Chaos had the highest pure album sales total of the week in Canada, debuting at number eight. The album was predicted to enter the top three of the UK Albums Chart. It went on to match the peak of previous album Heaven Upside Down when it entered the chart at number seven with first week sales of 4,638 copies, 437 copies behind the album which peaked at number three, making it the band's sixth top ten album in the UK. The record debuted at number one on the ARIA Charts, making it the band's second number one album in Australia, following 1998's Mechanical Animals. In Japan, the record debuted at number 28 on the Oricon album chart, with first week sales of 1,344 copies.
