Mudvayne – By The People, For The People

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impulse buy

Epic Recrds
Produced by Mudvayne

This a bit of a strange release in more ways than one. Above anything else it screams “stop-gap” while the wait continues for a follow-up to 2005′s Lost And Found, but on top of that it’s been put together in a unique, but ultimately confusing way.

The album title, By The People, For The People is a reference to the way the track-list for the album was put together. Aside from a couple of new tracks, fans on the band’s website were asked to pick the songs the band would include on a compilation album, with the proviso that the band would choose which versions of those songs were used. The reason for this being the band wanted to give the fans something more than a simple “Greatest Hits” CD, but more a rarities CD, but they wanted it to include the songs the fans wanted to hear most.

Additionally, the band have taken the unusual and rather ill-advised decision to include a spoken intro for each track, and one for the album as a whole, to explain the origins and reasons for choice of each version etc. This in actual fact makes the album 33 tracks long (so don’t let the tracklist below fool you), of which only sixteen are music. The intro pieces aren’t very length (the longest is 30 seconds, the shortest is five), and, to be honest, vocalist Chad Gray, who does all the talking, doesn’t have anything to say. You’re not going to get much insight into any of the songs. Half the time he just says “yeah, this is the demo version from 2003″ and that’s it.

Of the eleven tracks four are live versions and were all previously available on the bonus disc with the special edition of End of All Things To Come and nine are demo versions. The band should really have focused there efforts into producing a full live album, perhaps with the only three interesting tracks included here as bonus tracks, as the demos aren’t good enough quality. The three interesting tracks and, for my money, the only tracks worth buying this CD for, are new song Dull Boy (which isn’t great, but at least it’s a new song), a cover of The Police‘s King of Pain and an unreleased acoustic version of Forget To Remember.

If ever an album defined the term “for fans only”, it’s this one. Real die-hards may find something interesting in some of the demos, but if they’re die-hard enough to have the two-disc edition of End of All Things To Come (that’s the two-CD version, not the one with the DVD) then they’ve already got the live tracks. For all other fans, there are three tracks of genuine interest here, with a few curios, so think carefully.

“ ill-advised ”

Tracklist: Album Intro / Dig (Live) / Silenced (Demo) / Dull Boy / Death Blooms (Demo) / Fall Into Sleep (Demo) / Not Falling (Demo) / -1 (Live) / Happy (Demo) / (Per)version of A Truth (Demo) / World So Cold (Live) / On The Move (Demo) / Goodbye / Skrying (Demo) / All That You Are (Demo) / Forget To Remember (Acoustic) / King of Pain

Written by Andy Lye
More: Albums, Heavy Metal (Extreme Vocals), Mudvayne