A must for fans and no one else

Back in 1999, Mudvayne, behind masks and monikers, began shopping its nu-metal outfit to record labels. With songs such as "Death Blooms" and the blistering "Dig," the band was picked up by the Sony label and went on to establish an audience that has stayed with it for the past eight years. Now, Mudvayne repays its fans with its latest album of rarities and demos By The People, For The People. \nMudvayne takes an interesting approach to this record, compiling live cuts, demos and b-sides that were chosen by fans, with singer Chad Gray introducing each song. While the introductions help tie all the random cuts together into a cohesive album, they also make it an excruciating one hour and 41 minutes long.\nThe first half of the album features some of Mudvayne's radio-played singles and stronger material, offering a familiarity and strong pulse to the album right off the bat. Opening with a live cut of "Dig," the track captures the song's furious energy. Unfortunately, it is also one of two live tracks that capture Gray slurring his metal vocals. \nMost of the demos on this compilation, although stripped-down, don't sound much different from their studio versions. "Happy" sounds raw with its muddy distortion and without its clean-toned first verse. The guitar rhythm for "Not Falling" has a messy feel in the verse, and the chorus ushers in screaming background vocals left out of the album cut. By The People, For The People's new track "Dull Boy" feels like a reworked version of Lost and Found's "Pushing Through." \nAt about the midway point of By The People, For The People, the songs lose their vitality and things go south. "Goodbye" features the band experimenting for a brutal 6 1/2 minutes, as its attempt at ambient sound has this nu-metal quartet awkwardly searching for but never settling on a song idea. "Skrying" would be a pretty OK rock song if it were three minutes shorter. Finally, the album closes with the laugh-inducing cover of The Police's "King of Pain," offering a heavy dose of screaming and distortion never heard from the likes of Sting.\nConsidering this is an album that was compiled by the fans, By The People, For The People is a must strictly for Mudvayne fans. For anyone else who had pleasantly forgotten phrases like "nu-metal" and "rap-rock," this album can safely be ignored.