AMG Review of Volume 4: Songs in the Key of Love & Hate

Stephen Thomas Erlewine
All Music Guide

Give Puddle of Mudd credit for the title of their fourth album Songs in the Key of Love and Hate, as it makes plain their obsessions while dropping an offhand allusion to Stevie Wonder and Leonard Cohen. Musically, Puddle of Mudd hasn’t changed, still playing Nirvana as if they were party music like Stone Temple Pilots. POM manages to crank out a brute-force riffs that hook deeper than it has any right to, and there’s amusement to hearing “Spaceship,” “Keep It Together” and “Out of My Way” play as the life cycle of a love affair with a stripper in its progression from sex to love to hate.