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Album Details

• Artist: Mudvayne
• Album: Lost And Found
• Label: Epic
• Year of Release: 2005
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: sinist3r-punk on 2011-09-08

As shocking as it may seem, Mudvayne has released a third album. To be fair, it has been 3 years since they dropped off the face of planet hardcore with The End of All Things to Come. In the music industry, 3 years is an awful long time between albums, especially for bands that bombed on their last album. But we could see a musical resurgence the likes of which we have never seen. I know the talent is there, L.D. 50 was a technical showcase, and time heals all wounds, right?

Right now, I'd like to judge this album purely on its artistic merits and nothing else, forgetting that the band has ever released any albums before this. The opening track "Determined" is extremely loud and in your face, like a noisy friend that always bursts through your front door and immediately starts screaming demands for beverages and television. Except that "Determined" only hangs around for about 2 and a half minutes. "Pushing Through" is a decent track to follow "Determined", if a little familiar. The track that follows is familiar, but for an entirely different reason. I will admit that the first 2 tracks had me pretty excited. They gave the album an edge and opened up my imagination for the thrill ride of a lifetime. Sadly, this exotic honeymoon came to a close rather quickly when "Happy?" came oozing out of my speakers. For the first minute, I was fairly convinced that MTV just happened to be on somewhere in my house. For the sake of what little sanity I have left, I wish it was. The rest of the album is a series of hits and misses, with "Choices" having the opportunity to be a really great prog rock song, but ends up ruining it because the song is just too damn long. "Fall into Sleep" could have been a rare song that divides the line between radio play and underground spectacular, but fell short because that line doesn't exist.

If I could be retrospective for a minute, I'd like to draw attention to the rest of the Mudvayne catalog, L.D. 50 and The End of All Things to Come. L.D. 50 was a monumental debut album and really seemed to set Mudvayne off in the right direction, while The End Of All Things To Come just seemed to crap all over that and set the band in more of a Slipknot direction (i.e. wearing costumes and acting all badass while making music that kids can listen to on the radio). I was almost certain that L.D. 50 was the true Mudvayne, because who honestly makes an album of that magnitude and pays absolutely no attention to it? But after listening to Lost and Found, I'm fairly certain now that this generic, radio friendly direction is where Mudvayne wanted to go from the very beginning, and everything else was just an experiment that they seemed to ignore at every turn. I'm disappointed as a former fan, but I'm more disappointed as an advocate of genre defying music. I was sincerely hoping that Mudvayne would take the boundaries and obliterate them, but instead they seem to have fallen right between them.

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