Puddle Of Mudd

This debut album from Kansas City's Puddle of Mudd reveals them to be much more than just Limp Bizkit fans with angsty guitars. This alt-metal quartet deserves their Cinderella story, kicked off when they slipped a Bizkit security guard a demo tape and ended up as one of the first acts on Fred Durst's Flawless Records. This album shows them raging with the venom of Korn, then deftly showing their inner Weezer on "She Hates Me," only to return with the bored suburban snarl of "Bring Me Down." Arena rockers even before they ever hit an arena.

If the Who's Who's Next is the finest album ever made with a picture of someone urinating
on the cover, Puddle of Mudd's major-label debut, Come Clean (which features a child
relieving himself in the bushes), could be the worst. It's hard to imagine a record more
indebted to the leading lights of grunge and less imaginative about what to do with that
debt. "Control" and "Drift and Die" are so derivative of Alice in Chains that early D... More >