Manson’s debut, Portrait of an American Family, overseen by Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor, isn’t the sharply rendered cultural critique of America he’d like you to think it is. Most of the record comes off like some low-budget horror movie.  

 Smells Like Children offers more of the same: The disc is a collection of remixes, outtakes, and covers that includes a stomping remake of Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),” which improbably won Manson loads of mainstream-¬radio and MTV airplay.  

 But Manson got ambitious with Antichrist Superstar, a concept album of sorts that positions Manson as a nihilistic cartoon version of Public Enemy No. 1. 

 Mechanical Animals strips back the production just enough to let Manson’s band establish a personality, and the result is an album that even well-adjusted adults might appreciate. Manson traded his Alice Cooper–goes-industrial sound for strutting glam rock. 

 The crisply recorded concert album The Last Tour on Earth would’ve benefited from a DVD to capture the gory, trashy spectacle of his live shows. 

 Holy Wood is a goth-rock end-of-innocence saga. More melodramatic and bloated than its predecessor – and his lowest- charting album to date – it finds Manson actually trying to sing melodies while teeing off on his usual subjects: mass media, organized religion, and killing your parents. 

 Exhaustion overtakes The Golden Age of Grotesque, in which Manson admits “everything’s been said before” and so resorts to campy gibberish on the order of “Doll-Dagga Buzz-Buzz Ziggety-Zag” and “Ka-Boom Ka-Boom.”  

 Newcomers would do well by this hits set, which captures most of Manson's best moments. 

 For Eat Me, Drink Me, which he recorded and produced in a home studio with the help of bandmate Tim Skold, Manson delivers mostly mid-tempo goth-ballads (“Putting Holes in Happiness”) and icey dirges (“Eat Me, Drink Me”) often powered by nothing more than drum-machines and electric guitars. 

 This album mines familiar terrain, from the acoustic ballad “Four Rusted Horses” to the quasi-punk tune “We’re From America.” The one exception is “I Want to Kill You Like they Do in the Movies,” in which Manson reveals that underneath his bondage gear, the dude can also be a heartb...