"I am a revolution/ Pull my knuckles down" Manson howls in the chorus of "Cruci-Fiction in Space." For once, the self-styled Third and Final Beast is completely right: with Holy Wood, Manson pulls his own knuckles down, down, down until they scrape the ground. For an artist so wrapped up in the idea of evolution, it’s surprising how many steps backward Manson and company take on this album.

Sure, it’s everything we’ve come to expect from a Marilyn Manson album: pseudo-horror rock glossed over with just enough pop know-how to make it just ragged enough to rub preachers, parents and principals the wrong way and not scare away the kiddies, though this time, it’s a trick that’s quickly wearing thin. While nobody will ever lavish the title of "World’s Most Creative Rock Star" on Manson, Holy Wood finds Manson devolving back into his dirty Goth look and sound with a move that makes even his lowest-common-denominator shock-rock seem tired. Following his glam-rock makeover for Mechanical Animals (1998, Interscope), Manson’s retreat into his darker persona for this album is everything but the ever-changing artiste Manson pictures himself as.

Musically, Holy Wood sits somewhere between the choppy death rock of the band’s earlier albums and the slick space-glam of its last effort. The album’s most interesting tracks, like "The Love Song" with its deliberate back beat and wealth of synthetics, and "A Place in the Dirt," with its ambient screeches and concrete-shoes tempo, find Manson exploring hulking spaces and weighty arrangements. Other songs, however, come off as humdrum caricatures of the band’s dark side. Not waiting for anyone else to rip off "The Beautiful People," Manson recreates his hit in the album’s lead single, "Disposable Teens," with lackluster results; other songs from "The Love Song," to "The Death Song," mingle the band’s weightier slow side with its incredibly predictable predilection for now-run-of-the-mill death rock. Though the band tries its best to push its sound back into the dark with more intense and imposing spaces, most of Holy Wood looks more like a cheap makeover of the band’s original material.

Thematically, Manson will be Manson. Though the album touches on all of his obsessions (the media, the god/man relationship, evolution, the master/slave dialectic) as well as exhuming some even more obvious ones (guns, primarily), it doesn’t do much to really tie his issues together. While the album hints that guns are a step up the evolutionary ladder from simians and mankind and alludes to some nebulous affinity between guns and God, Manson’s lyrics are never precise enough to really deliver a threatening whole. There’s some vaguely interesting ideas floating under the surface of Manson’s ambiguous themes, but by this point in the game, nobody but the fundamentalists and Hot Topic fanatics are going to get much of a shock from this album.

For the final phase of the triptych consisting of Antichrist Superstar (1996, Interscope) and Mechanical Animals, Holy Wood is nothing but a letdown. While Manson’s sharp wit saved his two previous albums from falling into the death-rock ghetto, there’s not even enough of the Beast’s put-on to make this record interesting.