I'm an audiophile. That means I have sex with audio. Look it up.
I don't hear much talk about the sound quality of Marilyn Manson albums. There's plenty of talk about the song quality, or how this album is better than that one, and this other one sucked, or this one has a cool sound, but I've yet to have a good, substantive chat about the production, engineering, mixing, and mastering behind these albums. There's a reason for this: most of Manson's albums are a big sonic mess, and audiophiles would normally run screaming from them. Not me, though. I charge in headlong.
So I'm going to basically prattle on about it for an entire thread. You're welcome to read along or join in, but I'll be fucking shocked if anyone does once I bust out the math. There might be some math.
And to throw some red meat on this nerdy fire, I'm going to break down every album with a review of its sonic quality – intentionally trying to avoid discussing the quality of writing – and rank them from best to worst. There's a good chance that an album I don't like will win out against one that I love when compared on a sonic level, but that's just the way this cookie crumbles.
My goal is to do this as objectively as possible. That may sound like a contradiction; how could a “review” be objective? And you'd have a point there, but we're talking about quality. I think there's a way to discuss and compare each album's sound objectively, and even definitively say one sounds better than another. But how?
I'll use an example of two different photos. Two digital photos. They're both photos of cats, because it's the internet. Now, which one is the better picture? That is purely subjective. But dig this: one is taken on a camera phone built in 2003 with dirt on the lens at a resolution of 640x480, and the other is taken on a DSLR with a goddamned Zeiss lens at 4K resolution. It's still subjective as to which one is the “better” photo; folks might prefer the charming "retro" style of the former one, but I think there's a case to be made that the latter photo is objectively of higher quality. So I'm going to approach reviewing the sonic quality of Marilyn Manson records from that perspective. There's still going to be plenty of subjective stuff (read: my asshole opinions), but I'll try to behave.
And this is going to take a few days. And there will be tangents. Oh yes, there will be tangents.
So, let's start with a tangent: