The ghost of Kurt Cobain

Puddle of Mudd’s recent album advancer of their forthcoming CD, Come Clean, is a five-song program that pays a few debts to the late master of grunge, Kurt Cobain.

As such, the ghost of Cobain, and whatever’s left of the original Seattle scene, is all over the five songs on the advancer –Control, Drift and Die, Blurry, She Hates Me, and Out of my Head. To say, however, that the whole Come Clean is a Cobain clone would be an injustice to the band and perhaps to the dead man as well: five songs do not an album make, although we can get a pretty good idea of Puddle of Mudd’s drift in the sampler.

For the most part, the band has got its fundamentals down pat, as can be gleaned in the opening cut, Control, which has wonderful interplay between a slinky bass and a dominant ringing guitar.

The lyrics, "I like the way you look at me/ I like the way you smack my ass..." have a welcome irreverent sense of humor in them. This is carried through on to the fourth cut, She Hates Me, which begins unobtrusively enough with a lone guitar, then picks up and gathers momentum until the vocalist, driven by the rest of the band in full throttle, shouts the lines out of his lungs –again, a la Cobain. If that is not Nirvana at their best, then I don’t know what is.

Puddle of Mudd is at their most melodic in track three, Blurry, the centerpiece and inevitable standout in the advancer. Here they owe less to grunge than they do to the ’80s scene of jangling guitars and lyric flights, reminiscent of the Smiths and the Replacements. Again the guitarist knows only too well how to make his instrument scream when needed, and when to lay back and let the notes permeate the proceedings, filling the air with a lambent sustain tone.

In Drift and Die, the darker, more ominous side of the band shines through, this time with a killer hook lurking in the corner. The guitar work here could also be an indirect tribute to the work of the Edge in U2, one of the masters of sustain.

Out of My Head, as befits the title, is a rabble-rousing album closer, and could also be the final cut in Come Clean, as it is in the EP sampler.

Any final judgment on Puddle of Mudd, though, will have to wait. But as things stand, and based on the five impressive songs on P of M’s advancer, the ghost of Cobain, if not grunge itself, is alive and well.

Through the years, grunge has taken a few punches and hard knocks, mostly from critics disillusioned with the scene after the suicide of Nirvana’s frontman, and Pearl Jam’s own descent into a studied preciousness, as if they were left all alone to carry the torch.

Eddie Vedder, however, continues to make his presence felt, most recently in the benefit concert for the New York terrorist victims wherein he did an acoustic number with a Pearl Jam guitarist.

As for the others in that once magical scene sometime in the ’90s ... Foo Fighters, led by ex-Nirvana drummer Dave Grohl on guitar, is in many ways still a viable band, landing an occasional hit for radio play. The Foo Fighters even played at the Araneta Coliseum a few years ago, on the same bill as Sonic Youth and Beastie Boys.

And Soundgarden, though all but disbanded, soldiers on in spirit in the solo work of their former frontman Chris Cornell, who cannot seem to shake off his predilection for the offbeat and alternative even while flirting with mainstream forms.

Puddle of Mudd is in the same league as the aforementioned bands, but because the enhanced CD portion containing their biography remains unenhanced by any CD-Rom player, I cannot say for sure if they are from Seattle too.