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By Russell Eke Deftones have always been at their best when the band’s individuals stick to their guns with their ideas and avoid complying with their own formula; a fine example of which is White Pony, an album that still sounds fresh six years after its initial release. Their last effort (or lack thereof) was the sound of a band compromising itself for the sake of comfort, and inevitably hasn’t aged very well. Here, however, you can almost hear each band member physically yanking tracks like ‘Rapture’ in different directions. It’s fucking fantastic, in this case resulting in their best metal song since ‘Elite’. ‘Beware’ and ‘Riviére’ are further highlights, the latter being the perfect closing track for a Deftones album; there’s a melancholy air of finality to it that makes you want to go back and start the whole thing again. Frustratingly, a couple of the later songs are let down by some clumsy vocal delivery and/or unimaginative riffs (see the verses of ‘Rats! Rats! Rats!’ and ‘Combat’), and I’ll never understand Annie Hardy’s increasingly infamous and bewildering contribution to the end of ‘Pink Cellphone’ (look it up if you don’t already know), but after a few listens everything begins to fit into place and you come to realise that Saturday Night Wrist really works as a whole. If this is their last album, which by all accounts it could well be, they will have gone out on a high. |
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DEFTONES
- SATURDAY NIGHT WRIST