MARILYN MANSON

Two girls in fluffy white sheep outfits, a large man in a wedding dress wearing a black yarmulke, a kid decked out in a priest's collar, a Goth couple with hair spiked a foot off their foreheads, a guy in a dress on stilts -- and this was only a smattering of Marilyn Manson's rapt audience.

No band since the early days of Kiss or Alice Cooper has inspired such a devoted, dressed-up, fanatical following. And rightfully so. Through two albums and an EP -- but mostly through striking, controversial videos and intelligent, provocative interviews -- the man and the band named after him, Marilyn Manson, have captured the imagination of disenfranchised youth. And a Manson crowd is a predominantly young, susceptible bunch, willing to overlook the dearth of good songs for the plethora of powerful visuals and seemingly scary sloganeering.

Manson, nee Brian Warner, has the gift of garb -- during the show, when not flaunting a nearly emaciated body clad in a g-string, he's dressed, variously, as a Hitler figure, overseeing all as minister of musical propaganda, or as a sort of death's-head Tim Curry from the "Rocky Horror Picture Show" with "snow" falling eerily around him. The rest of the time, of course, he's his own mythic creation, as proclaimed on the title of the bands latest (Nothing/Interscope) album, "Antichrist Superstar." He's no charlatan, however; Manson's believability is a big part of the live shows' appeal. It's just a pity that the rest of the band is largely superfluous and the songs are generally so forgettable.

While many in attendance knew material from "Portrait of An American Family," it was the bands' breakthrough cover of the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams" that got much of the audience moving. No matter whether Manson was shouting "Time for cake and sodomy" or simply posing in carefully orchestrated lighting, the show was a sickly sweet Technicolor nightmare, visually mesmerizing, and a few times during the show, musically captivating as well. (The trance-like "Beautiful People" is the bands' stand-out single; samples abound, and good use of spooky organ sounds lends a futuristically funereal atmosphere to many of the songs.)

While Manson is at this point a triumph of style over substance -- do the kids chanting "We hate love/we love hate" rea