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Two years after releasing the surprisingly mature goth-metal offering The Pale Emperor, Marilyn Manson has returned to straight-ahead shock. “I write songs to fight and to fuck to,” he sings on “Je$u$ Cri$i$,” from his 10th LP, over spiky, electro-hard-rock riffs that occasionally recall his glammy Mechanical Animals period. That old black magic often sounds forced, but he makes up for it with a few more melancholy tracks, the best of which, “Saturnalia,” is an eight-minute ode to orgiastic revelry that feels like a long-lost descendant of Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.”
