page_title: Lest We Forget: The Best Of
section_title: Critical reception
hierarchical_section_title: Lest We Forget: The Best Of / Critical reception
caption_attribution_description: English: DM says goodbye. Hyde Park עברית: דיפש מוד אומרת שלום למעריצים - לונדון 25.06.2006 - תמונה שאני צילמתי
context_page_description: Lest We Forget: The Best Of is the first greatest hits album by American rock band Marilyn Manson. It was released on September 28, 2004, by Interscope Records. The album was conceived by the band's eponymous vocalist as a "farewell compilation", and was originally going to feature a duet with Shirley Manson of Garbage. Upon its completion, neither singer was satisfied with the duet, and it remains unreleased. Instead, the band recorded a cover of Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus", which became the only new track on the album and was released as a single. The deluxe version of the album included a bonus DVD containing sixteen music videos, one of which was the previously unreleased uncensored version of the music video for "Saint".
  Lest We Forget: The Best Of received mostly positive reviews from music critics, several of whom complimented its track listing. The compilation's commercial performance exceeded expectations in the United States, where it sold over 78,000 copies in its first week of release and had sold over a million copies as of late 2010.
context_section_description: In Spin, Chuck Klosterman called the compilation "[f]ucking awesome" and said "there are only about ten compelling metal acts out there right now, and Marilyn Manson is three of them." BBC Music's Richard Banks praised the album's "superb production" and Manson's "genius one-liners", saying "when the knob labelled 'shock-tactics' is already set to 10, one can't help but wonder where [Manson will] go from here." The Chicago Maroon's Matt Zakosek opined "It would be easy to write a pithy, sarcastic review deriding Manson for his over-the-top showmanship-but sometime in the midst of all that devilish preening and posturing, he found the time to make some pretty good music."
  Richard Abowitz of Rolling Stone stated that Lest We Forget "includes all of [Manson's] essential pied-piper calls to alienated suburban youth" and that "Manson's mix of fetish, goth, hedonism and metal still jells". A reviewer for Blabbermouth.net said that the album's track listing features "all of the group's classics". Monica S. Kuebler of Exclaim! said "if you've been holding onto your hard-earned bones waiting for that one essential Marilyn Manson collection (without the filler), you may want to proceed directly to the nearest record store and turn those bones over immediately."
  Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic found the album's omission of "Dope Hat" (1994), "Man That You Fear" (1996) and "I Don't Like the Drugs (But the Drugs Like Me)" (1998) "curious". He added that "Nevertheless, [Lest We Forget] has enough of the hits to make this worthwhile for the casual fans, as well as those listeners who never wanted to admit that [the band's] late-'90s alt-rock radio staples were guilty pleasures." In his book Dissecting Marilyn Manson, Gavin Baddeley opined that "for an album artist like Manson, [greatest hits] collections do fly in the face of the careful structure behind his best work, where the running order is an intrinsic feature of the package." Baddeley felt that, like the band's EP Smells Like Children (1995), "Lest We Forget is redeemed by a clever cover of an eighties pop song, in this case Depeche Mode's 'Personal Jesus'". Writing for PopMatters, Lance Teegarden described the band's cover of "Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)" (1995), "The Beautiful People" (1996) and "Mobscene" (2003) as "[a] few choice hits on a far too lengthy and same-sounding best-of."
caption: Gavin Baddeley praised the band's cover of "Personal Jesus" (1989) by Depeche Mode (pictured in 2006)
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