Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Deftones
Label: Maverick Records
Release: 2006
Once delinquents and eternal stoners, they’ve finally come back this year with a new album, and not with yet another batch of greatest hits or scraps that couldn’t find a home on any serious record. Three years after the self-titled album, which did serve up some material that can be filed under Deftones best-of, but is nowhere near their best, since White Pony set a whole new standard for what the max, the pinnacle and metal avant-garde really are, Madonna’s protégés are back with another attempt to convince us of their greatness. A lot has changed in the meantime.
Trends have staked out completely different boundaries for what counts as extreme. But the beauty and allure, the dreaminess of riding waves of cosmic static and essential stonedness bring at least a pinch of nostalgia back into an otherwise pretty mechanical-sounding world. With Saturday Night Wrist, Deftones have served up what they do best – we get a solid record packed with emotion, ramblings and hallucinating in a thousand metaphors, with a style that runs from ambient calm to screamo extremes. From serenity to total chaos. It’s all here.
The album opens with the first single, which they’ve been banking on from the very start. ‘Hole In the Earth’ gives off a sense of maturity they’ve reached musically by now. The Deftones sound recipe is laid out right there in front of you. Rocking and hammering cold but soft needles straight into our brains. ‘Rapture’ drives the spikes in deeper. With screaming and no compromise. Then comes the softening and meditation. From ‘Beware’ onward, a post-Depeche Mode melancholic sentiment takes over and doesn’t let go until the end. ‘Rats!Rats!Rats’ breaks the unbroken melancholy so far with a gnarled, almost slightly forced roar of screaming opening vocals. I don’t know, but it seems to me they no longer convince with the edge the way they did on the debut Adrenaline, where the raggedness and uncompromising fury fused organically into a whole. Now they sound almost too old for it. They obviously know it, because in the following songs they switch back to more spaced-out, electronic-guitar orgies of slowed-down shadows. Chino Moreno lets his thoughts out slowly, with Deftones-style finesse and an utmost sense of feel. The argument for why the record is beautiful is the song ‘Kimdracula’, a sexy mix of all the magician’s tricks Deftones have in their bag right now. The piano ending of ‘Riviere’ then brings the record calmly to its final fade-out.
Honestly, I’d struggle to say that anything disrupts the listening. If you don’t know the rest of the Deftones catalog, this is a wonderful introductory hour, suited to all sentimentalists and gentle souls, and definitely not to those prone to self-aggression, suicide or deep sadness. Deftones offer no comfort, they drive the knife in your heart in even deeper. Sound-wise, the record is far more palatable than its predecessor, the album Deftones. Partly because they finally parted ways, creatively and personally, with production wizard Terry Date, who produced their biggest stuff. But the exchange of life juices between them had stalled. Pro Tools recording technology made brainstorming easier. All that was needed was to clear out the excess and the distracting bits and weave new nets to catch those who had so far slipped away from their time and spells. Bob Ezrin did his homework with finesse and dressed the band in those shades of the sonic color spectrum where they feel best. Passion on one side and routine on the other are here a kind of inseparable Siamese twins. No detours into the unknown. They sound confident and good, sure, but there’s no sense of timelessness, because there are too many patterns that have already been tried and heard. In their career they’ve received plenty of praise, but also merciless criticism or even worse – some attempts to convince us of their own might went mostly unnoticed or were even overlooked. It’s also true that long ago, more than ten years back, they found their identity and invented their sound. They helped set what was then a completely new and fresh musical trend, which also became a fashion guideline and a criterion for what is and isn’t ‘cool’. Whether that makes them legendary and unforgettable, time will tell. With their work, Deftones still prove that their time isn’t up yet, they’ve only matured a little. Saturday Night Wrist is definitely a very good attempt to top their career-best album, but this time the throw fell half a meter short.
Lineup
Abe Cunningham – drums
Chi Cheng – bass
Chino Moreno – vocals, guitar
Frank delgado – keyboards, samples
Stephen Carpenter – guitar
Production
Bob Ezrin & Deftones
Track list
1. Hole In The Earth
2. Rapture
3. Beware
4. Cherry Waves
5. Mein
6. U.U.D.D.L.R.A.B.SELECT.START
7. Xerces
8. Rats!Rats!Rats
9. Pink Cellphone
10. Combat
11. Kimdracula
12. Riviere
TRACK LENGTH: 50:30
