Deftones

I had a friend named Joey, and he loved Deftones. Then one day it was like he wasn't allowed to like Deftones anymore, and i thought that was weird. I assume Katy Perry's mom grounded him for eating Satan's breakfast cereal or something and moved on with my life. I like Deftones a lot more now than i did back then, even their self-titled 4th album. They were originally going to call it Lovers, but Chino thought that was too up the nose. 

Remember when i talked about self-titled albums and how that's really hard to pull off in the middle of your career? Well yeah, critics at the time kept harping on it as a terrible change of direction that wasn't exciting. Nope, sounds unmistakeably like Deftones to me. Granted, Ichi - there's an obvious absence of turntable scratches ('cause Deftones rightly didn't want to sound like all the terrible 2003 younger brother Nu-metal bands they hooked on stereophonics in the late 90s), Ni - it is like a giant wash of mopiness from start to finish, and San (sorry, i finally saw Blade Runner and the floating Geisha advertisements are stuck in my head) -  Deftones is absolutely an acquired taste, but once you acquire it you can totally and without hesitation believe everything else is not butter. Linkin Park is totally drinkable, but they've got so much aspartame and non-dairy creamer with exotic tropical nut flavors mixed in that it barely qualifies as coffee to my palatte. Deftones is like licking the steel wool after you used it to clean up last night's tragic stir-fry accident; it's complex, moderately inadvisable, and above all abrasive. 

Now, you're absolutey right that Korn beat them to the album making punch, and it was Korn who asked them to come on tour and put them in front of real label personelle, but Deftones had been around and playing shows since '88, albeit playing mostly Rap-Rock with randomly different members every few months. Might sound crazy to hold up Korn as the more stable, marketable, and radio-friendly of the two, but Johnathan Davis' whine-singing is objectively more "in tune," and his screaming merely sounds like a really upset person screaming. Chino Moreno's screaming, however, is the stuff of dystopian nightmares and the liberty he takes with tonality when he does "sing" borders on felonious. It's supposed to, he is to quote My Chemical Romance "not OK." As for the favorite critical analogy that "Deftones is the Radiohead of Metal," all i can say is whaaa? That's complete nonsense that doesn't even make sense in the nonsense sense of sense. Does that make Korn "the Oasis of Metal?" Not rhetorical, you should be saying "holy hell, no" out loud as you read this. 

So, how is this thing about Lovers? Beats the hell out of me, we start with what i assume is a suicide bomber hyping himself up for detonation. Symbolically speaking, hexagrams and car bombs are not particularly obtuse. 

The rest of the songs make more sense from the lovers angle, but definitely not in the sense that they love each other. I know i'm pretty down on the whole psycho-musicology thing, but only when it makes no sense and you're just grasping for an angle. If however, the songwriter says "yep i was coked/speeded up to my gills going through a nasty divorce and making nonsensical gibberish 19 hours a day for months on end," then it is not at all surprising these are the songs he barely remembers writing. For all the obtuseness, and believe me there's plenty, these aren't Valentines Day card sentiments. Pretty sure he falls in love with a stripper named Moana at the end. Makes watching that Disney musical real difficult if you don't have a bottle collection like mine. 

Now look, just because i personally take the position that men are somewhere between 50 to 100 of the reason hetersexual couples get divorced, doesn't mean we can't all thoroughly enjoy listening to his verbally expressed suffering. Long as we all recognize he's being a whiny manbearpig, things will eventually get either better or substantially more worse to the point we officially don't have to care anymore. It's totally ok if your honest feelings are garbage, you just throw them in the dumpster and go find new ones. No "high school sweethearts" on the planet have a functional relationship, and as far as i'm concerned "high school" lasts until you're intellectually in your mid 30s. Now, if you're physical 19 going on mental 37 then all the best mi amigo, but if you're 19 going on 20 like any regular dickhead, there's either a real or metaphorical trailer park in your not too distant future, and it should not be any sort of surprise that you're getting divorced at 30 like Chino as he wrote this album. Not surprisingly, he subsequently got a lady pregnant and tried to keep that a secret like he'd lose his football scholarship if anyone found out. We clearly aren't dealing with any form of maturity here, is what i'm saying. I think it's a great idea for everyone to really know what immaturity looks and sounds like. Self-titled 4th album Deftones is a completely enjoyable listen for that lesson.