First of all, listen to the sound clips on this page. If they sound good to you, you obviously haven't heard enough music in general. If they sound like 90 other bands you just heard on the radio, you're getting warmer. If you're wondering why this album is already a "bestseller", here's a hint. I read an article about this band's record label offering prizes for the fan who can illegally stuff the ballot the most times for the single on MTV's video request show TRL. They even give instructions on how to get around the site's security measures! It makes sense, since the only way to differentiate between this band and a hundred others is if you know what they look like. The music itself is completely anonymous garbage. Does anyone remember the 80's Glam-rock explosion? This is the same type of thing. You could call this band the Enuff Z'nuff of 2001. Take your pick. It's an imitation of an imitation, all packaged and preened by the great pretender himself: Fred Durst. This record contains the same boring bulls**t being played on radio stations all across the country. Vedder-like vocals (faking a sincere voice: ironic, no?), overprocessed guitars and a general "oh, poor me" attitude. Are you going to let a record label executive tell you what's good? Why not seek out good music for yourself and let MTV spoon feed the garbage they spew to someone else. In five years or so everyone's going to be giggling about these bands, and the used CD rack at your local store is going to be choked with monochromatic, unoriginal tripe.

1. I'm already sick of comparisons of this band to Creed. 2. Wesley Scantlin does not sound like Eddie Vedder. 3. People need to quit labeling groups "post-grunge." Grunge was not a time period - it was, and is a musical style.

...and for the review. Well, the main reason I picked up this album was because of the single "Control." I played it in my car, waiting for dissapointment after Control ended, but to my suprise, the rest of the songs actually make the album worth owning. There is a consistent hardness throughout the album even on the "lighter" "She Hates Me" which is kinda of a wacky song...more fun than wacky.

What got me even more on this album, is this is one of Fred Durst's "star search" bands that he just found and happened to give a record deal (much like Staind...Durst's other mentionable). Puddle of Mudd shows that Fred Durst has actual musical taste, which is undetectible on his own albums...

Buy this album. Wont dissapoint.

If I hear ONE MORE band like this one, I think I'm going to scream!

Utterly devoid of talent. Incredibly lame lyrics. Atrocious "singing." Guitar guy slashing at his axe and producing nothing more than a loud, sludgy mush of white noise with no dynamic range whatsoever. Drummer bashing away with all the musicianship of a brain-damaged monkey on caffeine. All wrapped up in the standard package of oh-so-earnest angst, anger, rage, pain, "important statements," blah-blah-blah-blah.

Hey dudes. The '90s are dead. Grunge is long gone. And in the wake of September 11, all of your whining about how your life stinks (yeah must really suck to be a rock star) and how messed up you are and how you're so damn depressed you're going to hurt yourself, and how that girl you met "f-in hates me," just sounds so pathetically insignificant it's laughable. I mean, really. Go take a nature walk, get out into the sun, do some volunteer work helping people, take a vacation, do SOMETHING other than whine oh-so-morosely about your pathetic, wasted life.

This kinda stuff is getting really, really, really old, and especially in today's times, it could almost pass for comedy if it weren't so unlistenable.

After hearing the catchy single "Control" several times on the radio and on MTV, I decided to give these guys a chance. They sounded similar to Creed or Pearl Jam on their single, both musically and vocally, that may not be a bad thing, just a lack of originality. But I was totally surprised and have to give these guys credit, they have put out a very eclectic album that will appeal to just about anyone. The first song on the album is "Control", which is a good song musically and vocally, but the lyrics seem to contradict themselves. The next song "Drift and Die" starts acoustic but starts to hit harder towards the end, the fifth song "Blurry" is similar, these two are probably my favorites on the album. All around great songs. The third and fourth tracks, "Out of My Head" and "Nobody Told Me" are heavier, with good vocals and lyrics. "Out of My Head" is another of the highlights on the album. On "She Hates Me" they take a lesson from STP and put a poppy song in the album, the lyrics are funny, though. Cool song. "Bring Me Down" is another good, upbeat song, with a lot of guitar, similar to Nirvana. "Never Change" and "Basement" are two heavier songs before the album becomes acoustic again to finish up. "Said" and "P*** It All Away" slow down the album, both are good, but not as good as the earlier acoustic tracks. "Said" is more uptempo with cool bass and drum lines and heavy sections that give the track a little more force. Overall very good album, much better than anything Durst could put out and they are on his label. And to answer my question in my title, these guys are more than Creed-lite, possibly even better than the supergroup themselves. Recommended album for just about anyone, especially fans of Staind, Nirvana, STP, Pearl Jam, etc.

Puddle of Mudd had potential. They were a group of boys who are trying to achieve the American dream. They came out of no where to be signed to a major label by Fred Durst (who, love him or hate him, is an undeniably big name in the music business). Their debut sold millions of copies and spawned a string of hit singles. So all should be well in the Puddles camp, right? Well no, actually. Their debut, 2001's "Come Clean," didn't receive many positive reviews, and Puddle of Mudd aren't going to be nominated for a Grammy any time soon. Why not? Because, simply put, this C.D. is just not very good.

There are a couple of decent songs on here (i.e. "Control" and "Blurry") which might get stuck in your head, but almost every other song sounds exactly the same. Puddle of Mudd almost never deviate from their hard-soft-hard-soft-soft-hard and intro-verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-outro song structure, so the songs become very predictable and repetitive. So, this C.D. eventually gets so boring that it becomes almost unlistenable. Even catchy songs like "Drift and Die" aren't memorable, because they follow the same formula as every other song.

When I saw them in concert, I was (briefly) a big fan of this band, so I listened to "Come Clean" with an open mind. And I try to like every C.D. I purchase...I really do. In order to like all of my C.D.'s, I can't afford to make comparisons. I have said "It's not as good as...but it's good in its own right" or "It's a good listen" many different times about many different C.D.'s. For example, I didn't like Staind's last album, "14 Shades of Gray," as much as their "Break the Cycle" album, but it was still a good listen. "Come Clean," however, just isn't good or catchy enough to ignore its hard rock cliches. Soft-hard verse-chorus song structures are no longer new, and they are, in fact, very stale and old. Some bands, like Staind and Mudvayne, use the soft-hard song formats and are able to make them work. Unfortunately, Puddle of Mudd is not one of those bands, so the songs on "Come Clean" come across sounding very formulaic. The only song that breaks the monotony is the acoustic album closer, "P-ss It All Away"; but an entirely acoustic song at the end of an album isn't exactly a new concept, either.

It's also almost impossible to dismiss Puddle of Mudd's blatant imitation of other grunge bands, like Nirvana and Alice in Chains. If Puddle of Mudd were more talented or made more catchy songs, nobody would care that they're a Nirvana imitation, and that every one of their songs follow the same overused structure. But Puddle of Mudd only have rudimentary songwriting skills and instrumental abilities, so they just can't re-create the great verse-chorus friction that Nirvana had.

Since their music is so cliche, Puddle of Mudd fall under the "secondhand" or "imitation grunge" genre. And Wes' vocals don't help his band to escape that label. He draws too heavily from his influences, thus resulting in corny vocal styles (singing in the verses, then yelling over the hard choruses.)

This album has one final, major downfall. The subject matter is about nothing else besides Wes' tortured, hopeless life. Not a single ray of hope shines through these lyrics, but Wes isn't the true head case that Kurt Cobain was, so he can't recapture the primal urgency that Nirvana had. Plus, Wes groans, moans, and drones so incessantly, and with no conviction, that the listener doesn't understand why they should care how bad his life is.

If "Come Clean" had been released ten years ago, it would have been this band's meal ticket. But this is the 21st century, and too many bands (before Puddle of Mudd) have made this C.D. So, the songs on Puddles' debut are not only indistinguishable from one another, they are also indistinguishable from a lot of other bands' songs.

In conclusion, "Come Clean" is not a terrible album; it has some catchy, listenable songs, but a catchy song isn't necessarily a good one. And you've probably heard those songs a hundred times on the radio. Ultimately, all this album is good for is proving that grunge is dead, it died over a decade ago, and it died for a reason.