Heavy metal used to be pure daydream, a free-floating matrix of fantasy that any band could plug into. Now, under the new guise of "heavy music," it is a recovered-memory seminar, an egotistical mess, all about I, I, I. Common words pop up: numb, torture, enemy. And the voice of the new metal is the Whine.

The Whine is not quite singing and not exactly screaming, but something a little less showy. It is a release of the least-likable inner self: the needy, wheedling, passive-aggressive creep who is embarrassed and enraged by petty things, who still hasn't gotten over the taunting in high school. The Whine often has a Southern California kick -- a weird combination of Bobcat Goldthwait's paranoid-vegetable humor and the Lothario purr of Jim Morrison. And the Whine is now as important to getting a rock album 0n the charts as leather pants and eye makeup were in 1985. Korn's Jonathan Davis has it. Slipknot picked it up.

And the Whine is not about expressing adolescent confusion; it signifies the certainty of revenge, a kind of violent zombie-speak. "You can't kill me/'Cause I'm already deep inside you," Slipknot sing on their surprise hit album, Slipknot. This is a feeling that echoes through so much of the new metal -- cold-eyed resignation, for one purpose or another.

Mudvayne, a Peoria, Illinois, band whose major-label debut, L.D. 50, is executive-produced by Slipknot percussionist Shawn Crahan, paint their faces in kooky designs and cite Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as inspiration. Mudvayne's big songwriting device is the old Nirvana strategy: vulnerability in verses, ape-shit aggression in choruses and a pregnant moment in between, when you hear the voice cracking with the swell of adrenalin. The interesting thing about Mudvayne is that some of them are fancy musicians: Bassist Ryknow has got jazz fusion somewhere in his background, and the band uses disquieting sounds and spoken words to form collages that are clearly influenced by, and better than, the ones on Slipknot's second album. Mudvayne's biggest drawback, though, is that we might not want to know their psychodramas.

"Blame Mother for the sick