»Similarities between Omega and Ziggy Stardust«

Like all things shocking, Madison avenue quickly began homogenizing Marilyn into something a bit easier to swallow. Focusing on his affection for bizarre contact lenses, eyewear companies have come out with an entire string of their own crazy looking contacts. Not content to simply the change your eyecolor to some other race? Change your eye color to nothing else at all! Everything from the Marilyn Manson look to a black eightball. Pro Wrestlers like STING have followed suit.

So instead of allowing himself to be co-opted, Marilyn has reinvented himself and that is where OMEGA AND THE MECHANICAL ANIMALS comes in. From a 1970's retro futuristic look via gold lame to a plasticized alien reconstruction of Marilyn himself ("Itself" in this case. You didn't like the constant genital references in his previous albums? No problem! No genitals or nipples in this incarnation! Happy now? Who wouldn't be?) The pictorial Bowie references are very explicit. The album collaboration with Trent Reznor and David Bowie on the LOST HIGHWAYS soundtrack has left its mark. The music sounds very Bowie-esque as well, but this is a Bowie who moved forward with his talents instead of running out of steam. In fact, one song, The Speed Of Pain starts off with an acoustic riff that made me think of David Bowie's Space Oddity before turning into a Bowie/Pink Floyd sound. This isn't a sound that Manson and company are used to playing, but the band takes to it, expands on it and somehow makes it their own, as surely as any great actor becomes the role.

An entirely new creative energy emerging on the stage, but not before a tantalizingly slow set change from the band before (whoever they were? Slade, maybe?) Then the main event, the arrival of Ziggy stardust, Bowie in his most outageous and purest persona. It seemed that if you were in the audience and you blinked one or two times he had on a different costume. Orange hair way before punk was even a term. Lipstick, eye-shadow, who is this guy? It really was as if he were the man who fell to earth. Mick Ronson blowing our young, impressionable minds with his keyboard playing. This CD definitely captures an era, before glam-rock had become a cliche and the whole androgynous rock-star motif had lapsed into self-parody. Bowie really did represent something entirely new and fresh at that moment in rock-history.