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Page 1
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Mudvayne go from sick Clark Kents to bloody, screaming Supermen ...
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Page 2
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"It was all rotted and liquefied and it was the most disgusting odor you could ever
imagine." ...
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Page 3
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The aliens are dead, and the truth can only be known in silence ...
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Mudvayne Photos: Onstage And Backstage
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Follow the masked crusaders through a night of music
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For the promotional photos for The End of All Things to Come, Mudvayne were shot as space aliens with misshapen heads and bug-eyes because the bandmembers share an interest in UFOlogy, but don't count on Mudvayne showing up to meet-and-greets looking like patrons in the bar scene from "Star Wars." And they'll probably never perform that way either.
"Anybody that followed the band closely knows that there has never been a consistent image with us," Spüg said. "The only consistent thing about this band is that we have always involved ourselves in theatrics. If you look inside L.D. 50, you'll see me with black and white stripes, and I've never played in that. Every day we go onstage and do something different."
Maybe so, but the space-bug mythos has inspired some alien encounter mags to interview Mudvayne about their experiences with little green men. Tellingly, the bandmembers would much rather talk to these folks than the mainstream music press.
"Those interviews are really fun to do, and they're the only ones I'll talk to about the alien encounter stuff, but that doesn't mean I'm telling the truth," Spüg said with a gleam in his eye, revealing the sense of humor that listeners all too often miss. "There's definitely a comedic aspect to the band," he added. "Why do you think we all put umlauts in our names?"
"The only thing that we take super-serious about ourselves is the music," Chüd piped in. "The visual stuff is just stimuli to help you enjoy a journey, an experience that is a Mudvayne show."
Ah, the music. For anyone who wrote the band off last time as being too arty, noisy or convoluted, The End of All Things to Come will come as an unexpected revelation. Mudvayne are still playing multi-textured metal loaded with prog-rock shifts, but this time they're tempering the technical acrobatics with atmospheric touches, stark, moody melodies and even vocal harmonies. Overall, the disc sounds like a scarring blend of Pantera, Voivod and Tool, with a smattering of King's X. Credit the band's evolution to months of touring and diligence in the studio, but producer David Bottrill deserves praise for shaping and finessing Mudvayne's mammoth sound.
"He has a great sense of emotional dynamics in songs," Spüg enthused. "He is able to capture a sort of musical transparency with really good staging to create a dimensionality that's really exciting."
There's a duality to Mudvayne that's hard to ignore. Their music is simultaneously raw and complex and their sentiments are both primal and lofty. And listening to their drummer's philosophical musings, it's easy to forget they're coming from a guy who calls himself Spüg.
"A lot of our fans love the heaviness of the music, so we've got that market that we're accommodating, but we also have a very serious level of adult content," he explained. "We've always struggled to try to balance these things. I think we're talking about stuff that does obviously go way over a 13-year-old kid's head, but I don't think it takes away from their listening experience."
While Mudvayne's music is intensely loud and Spüg is never at a loss for words, when the guys want to find some clarity, they unplug, put the instruments down and shut up.
"I would say about 99.9 percent of the things we are attached to are illusory, and truth is only known in silence," he concluded. "The seeming chaos that we're surrounded with is actually not involved in reality, and if we want to get into some sort of truth, we have to shed ourselves of these attachments and look within."
Or you can just crank up The End of All things to Come when you're in a crappy mood and thrash around the room until you feel a little better.
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Photo: Nitin Vadukul
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