In Review: Mudvayne - The New Game

Mudvayne’s The New Game dropped on Tuesday and I wasn’t sure what to expect from this. I just haven’t been in to Mudvayne since The End Of All Things To Come. For whatever reason I wasn’t interested in Lost And Found enough to give the entire album a listen. I knew I was getting an advance copy of The New Game sometime this week so I went out and found a used copy of Lost And Found so I could kind of get a feel of the progression of the band without skipping over any albums. I honestly forgot about the two main singles off of Lost And Found, Happy and Forget To Remember. I remember liking both of these songs but as I said, I still wasn’t interested enough at the time to listen to the album.

One great thing about part of the Nu-metal era was that not very many bands sounded alike…the good ones anyway. Mudvayne, Slipknot and Mushroomhead did well by setting themselves apart from each other in the musical sense. They were three very different bands (With the exception of the costume gimmicks) thrown in to the nu-metal genre. LD50 was an amazing album in the sense that it was something different, something really great in the midst of a lot of redundant nu-metal and mainstream musical vomit that was plaguing the radio waves and Mtv. Grunge was finally dying off and unfortunately a new wave of “punk” was moving in. For a lot of metal fans, these bands brought some kind of hope that metal was coming back in a new wave and so it did. There was still a lot of good metal out there but sometimes you just had to look really hard for it.

The End Of All Things To Come brought a sound of a more melodic sounding Mudvayne and you could hear a little less of the twangy bass that LD50 had to it. The songs were written in a more conventional way than LD50 was. It was different in a good way, yet it still sounded like Mudvayne.

Lost And Found had a different kind of heaviness to it that the previous two did not. It also sounds more guitar driven than bass driven, however it still held that bass in the background that a lot of people fell in love with on the first two.

With The New Game ,it feels like all three kind of rolled in to one. I couldn’t sit here and tell you what every song means, but I will say that it’s another emotionally filled flurry of madness. The twangy slap bass is more evident than Lost and found and this album just explodes after the intro of Fish Out Of Water.

If you haven’t heard, there is an actual contest entwined in this album where you have to watch an online video, do some searching and researching for clues and suspects. There are clues in the lyrics and that becomes quite evident in Fish Out Of Water where you double take a portion of the lyrics where you think it should say “Throw The Oars Overboard” but it reads “Through The Oars Of A Board“. What does that mean? I haven’t the slightest clue. This song is a great opener though. Some songs you may have heard like Dull boy which was on For The People By The People. The rest of the songs are either emotionally filled experiences of anger and heartache, political statements or a conceptual story.

There is a lot more melody in The New game than there is in their previous albums. You still have the great riffs that Mudvayne seems to come up with and the beefy slap bass riffs that compliment them. Chad Gray’s voice sounds the same as it does on every other album. Unique in his own way and range. The song arrangements are slow to fast, fast to slow like so many other Mudvayne arrangements. I’m not saying that The New Game sounds like every other album, I’m just saying that it still sounds like Mudvayne and that’s what everyone wants right?

The new way of people saying that they don’t like how an album sounds is to say it sound “Uninspired”. A while ago it was cool to say that an album is just “Meh”. I don’t think that either of these statements are true to The New Game. I think it’s a solid album with a lot of catchy riffs and choruses that make it everything a Mudvayne fan would want. If you want another LD50 then I think you’re out of luck. If you want a matured and more melodic Mudvayne then this is what you’ve got.

Some people are going to say that it sucks only from hearing the streamed version and I can tell you from experience that that is not the way to judge any album. Get it in your hands and sit down to give it some uninterrupted listening. If you’ve been a fan of everything they have done up until now then you’ll enjoy The New Game. If you haven’t really listened to Mudvayne since The End Of All Things To Come, go out and buy both Lost And Found and The New Game because you’re missing out if you dismiss these two records.

Check out Mudvayne.com to find out how you can get in to The New Game and possibly win a “VIP Laminate for life”. Oh, and there is another album coming in 2009, in case you hadn’t heard.

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