Ryan Martinie Was in the Wrong Band

I listened to a lot of terrible nu metal bands when I was younger. I used to be embarrassed about this but the truth is that such is the journey of every "trve" metal head. And you know what? It wasn't even that bad. In fact, give it a few more years and we'll probably see some kind of revival. It's inevitable. That's just how these things work.

That said, even in my more orthodox metal days, Mudvayne has always bordered on the acceptable for me, thanks largely to the exceptional bass work of Ryan Martinie. Nu metal is a genre where the band largely functions as one bludgeoning instrument, with the bass buried in a pile of grunting down-tuned garbage. Martinie's performance on the band's 2000 debut, L.D. 50, was probably the first truly impressive instrumental performance I can remember singling out.

Again, without disparaging the entire genre, nu metal didn't exactly ask a lot of its guitar players. But Martinie found a way to slap, slide, and pop everything he could out the sound, his bass lines defining their early hits "Dig" and "Death Blooms." With his pointy devil's doo and manic smile, Martinie channeled the manic intensity and technicality of Danny Elfman into a theatrical nu metal mold (I'm sure he would find the idea insulting, I would have loved to hear him on some bonkers tech death album). I was too young and inexperienced to realize it at the time but it was cool as hell. Check out a few of their live performances, with Martinie effortlessly pulling off his insanely technical parts while wearing some really cumbersome pants. You definitely won't feel embarrassed.