Mudvayne

Shit! Who’s that? It’s Fred Durst! No wait! - he’s way cooler - there’s no camp baseball hat for a start! Man… that’s a Mudvayne t-shirt he’s wearing! It’s Mudvayne!

And that’s how I spotted Mudvayne from the safety of Manchester’s larger HMV._ Weird. For metalheads they seemed quite _gentle, almost poetic in their delirium of excitement exploring Manchester, equipped with loaded cameras, small backpacks and plain white Marks’n’Sparks bags, presumably containing bath salts of some kind. Stalking Mudvayne from a safe but possibly still criminal distance, I see the band get into a taxi, looking up for a brief moment to give me the necessary and multi-purpose ‘Sign of the Beast’. Man... Mudvayne rock.

Enough of that though, for now at least, I haven’t even told you about Sikth! Awwww... Sikth... We first encountered them sweating and a'rocking with deathly passion and intensity in the dingy, flea infested pits of Camden, appearing every now and then on Rocksound samplers (got the one with Vex Red and Mahamodo? Its ace!) and Org Record action packs. It seems they’re been ‘spending some time in the studio’ _(which may be the truth, or might just be a sorry excuse for a teeeeny 20 minute set) so are unprepared to spend too long on stage tonight, but that’s all good, as all their songs are fucking awesome! Tag team vocals, sounding like men singing with lit firecrackers down their gullets, pound the eardrums while the drums devour the music in a totally progressive metal performance. This tears apart the venue and after the nearly famous set closer, _‘Such The Fool’, my thoughts wander on to when that new album’s coming out.

....Soon enough satanic screaming and thumping (not unlike the way I imagine war sounds) is heard above, (the bar underneath, rather than at the back of the venue). We race upstairs and there are the four figures I saw earlier, but now covered in paint, some in boiler suits, and fired up for a show. Now *Mudvayne *seem much more deadly. No longer do their evil fists carry M&S bags, for now they carry the tools of rock, and their set is blinding! Mudvayne are so tight now they really come across with the same power and determination of any other mainstream metal band. They sing with absolute guile and it feels like they really love being here, doing this, spreading the sound of their music, their definitive type of metal. After the expected American jism about Osama and (“God knows how he became the…”) President Bush, Mudvayne scale the end of their set far better than I've ever heard before, better than anything they've done on CD. The set has been great - tight - loud - maximum riffage, everything you need to rock, and they leave me wanting more.

Mudvayne: Slipknot they are not.