Review Summary: Eh...
This was a really weird album for me. I was a very big fan of "White Pony", and I have since found "Around the Fur" and "Saturday Night Wrist" to be really excellent CDs. If not on a technical level, they certainly excelled emotionally, where they weren't dripping in faux angst like their nu metal peers. It was just intense enough to find interesting.
They were also interesting in their inconsistency, which is where I think their self-titled falters. Where "White Pony" was frequently dissonant and bizarre, we didn't expect anything else so that, even when it would change into, say, "Teenager", it would still make sense. This was also present in "Around the Fur", where "Dai the Flu" and "MX" have such slow and bizarre parts that it's almost disturbing, but they made it work.
With this CD, my only real complaint, and it is a rather large one, is that the songs seemed very similar as a whole. Individually, many songs are very unique and dissonant, but when you have the same sounds repeated over and over it seems overwhelming. This CD could have been one really long song as far as I could tell. Even with some stand out tracks, there is little difference between all the songs. "Minerva", then "Good Morning Beautiful", then "Deathblow", then "When Girls Telephone Boys". When looking back on them after listening, I found that the overall feel of these songs never change.
That's not to say that many of the songs on here aren't good. "Good Morning Beautiful" has possibly the most catchy chorus on the album, which makes it far more memorable. "Deathblow" has an excellent introduction bass line, and"Hexagram" is a very cool song with gorgeous guitar backing ridiculous screaming. "Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event" is probably the best song on here, being a very somber song and having a really gorgeous melody. "When Girls Telephone Boys", however mindless it may seem at first, is a very logical step in the whole flow of the album.
So in the end what I'm trying to say is that, though the album flows excellently, and most tracks on their own seem pretty good, together they almost seem relentlessly depressing and make "Deftones", at least before multiple listens, too big of a pill to swallow.