Review Summary: It's a testament to their ability that even their shoddiest and laziest album is still appreciable, but this disappointment of an album still stands out by far as the worst in Deftones' acclaimed catalogue since their debut.
Have you watched the videos of the writing sessions of this album? You should, it's telling. Telling of how maybe we shouldn't have been so surprised at what a disappointment this album was after all. For videos supposedly entailing writing sessions, we are humoured with footage of Deftones doing pretty much everything but writing; Stephen Carpenter smoking crack, the band members idly lazing around cracking unintelligible jokes. An especially striking scene is the one in which the band members are sprawled over a sofa, while producer Terry Date pleads for them to get up and get some writing done, to which Chino Moreno mumbles something incoherent regarding a mouth full of seeds, with seemingly no intention of actually obeying him. There's a reason Terry Date refused to work with Deftones again after this album, citing their infuriating lack of drive, and the overwhelming amount of time they took to actually write music. And that's the sole reason why this album was such a blooming letdown; there was barely any effort involved. No one bothered. Deftones themselves admitted to having rushed this album. Strange, considering they spent
6 months in the recording studio. And in the end, no one really liked it. Not even Deftones. The fans certainly didn't like it; the album was a huge commercial letdown, and pretty much led to the end of their continued commercial success. (I'm pretty sure a quarter of the 500,000 purchasers only bought the album because of that pretty impressive artwork.)
And looking at the music, it's fairly easy to tell why. We start off on an astoundingly high note, the head-crushing
Hexagram. Deftones did say they were returning to their heavier, darker sound, but we certainly didn't expect anything as madly, yet as brilliantly heavy as this. Moreno's amazing infinitesimally quick transitions between singing and screaming, the melodic chord progression in sharp contrast to the brutal riffs of the chorus. Such an impressive opener only hints at the potential to be expanded upon, the brilliance of what's to come next in the album. Except, that, well...
...unfortunately, it all falls to mediocrity pretty quickly after that. Enter
Needles and Pins, where the exact same riff is repeated over, and over, and over, and
over again to the point of nausea. All that saves this song is Chino's noteworthy throat-ripping screams. While we do experience the periodic highs in the forms of hit lead single
Minerva,
When Girls Telephone Boys and
Bloody Cape, the album is worn thin by dull, mediocre songs with unnecessarily stretched running times such as
Deathblow,
Battle-axe and
Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event, in which the whole song is pretty much an uninteresting event.
Mediocre. And that is the sole word that describes what brings this album down so much. What Deftones did to differentiate themselves from the pack, the dumping ground of nu-metal, in previous albums like "Around the Fur" and "White Pony" is barely existent in this album. Stephen Carpenter, long known for his innovative style of guitar playing and love for dissonant riffs, seems to have exhausted his creativity, relying extensively and overly on mere power chord abuse. In songs like
Deathblow,
Battle-axe and
Moana, absolutely nothing happens
but standard, pedestrian, stale, dull power chords. While the rhythm section seems to be at the top of its game for most of this album, with Chi whipping out some of his best bass lines and Abe coming up with near-perfect beats to carry the songs along, a metal band as extensively reliant on good guitar riffs as Deftones is affected pretty tremendously when their guitarist isn't up to scratch, which is one of the primary reasons this album suffers so much compared to its predecessors and successors.
Flow and track-listing especially seem to be another problem in this problem, albeit less glaring; it seems that the tracks, once completed (to some degree), were just haphazardly thrown together without regard to making tracks segue somewhat into one another. For instance, placing the soft trip-hop piece
Lucky You between the harder tracks
Battle-axe and
Bloody Cape seems quite foolish; the atmospheric, and near-blissful
Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event between the heavy
Bloody Cape and the dark
Moana even more so.
It even seems that a noticeable part of the album's writing wasn't even fully finished at the point of release; the worst offender of this being the closer
Moana, obviously pushed all the way to the back for a reason. While considered by many to be a travesty compared to every other closer in the Deftones catalogue, it starts out interestingly enough, with the darkest, most sinister riff in the entire album. Then you realise that the entire song ends around the halfway mark, loops back to the very beginning and
repeats itself with absolutely no variations. Lesser offenders include the repeatedly mentioned
Battle-axe and
Deathblow, in which the opening power chords are just repeated over and over till the song decides that it's reached a respectable run time, without a bridge or any variation at all.
Needles and Pins, too, suffers a similar fate. The
Hexagram-rivaling meatiness of
When Girls Telephone Boys' verses is ultimately brought down by a lazily constructed chorus comprising of a single open dropped power chord.
Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event starts with breathtakingly beautiful toy piano and strings, but absolutely
nothing else happens throughout the course of the song apart from Chino's vocals, making it a mundane listen despite Moreno's best vocal efforts.
What's especially sad is how much potential this album held, and how amazing this album could have been, if Deftones actually put in effort. And where they did put in effort, it definitely shows. Deftones definitely had the right ideas in mind when they decided to make a heavier, darker album more like their pre-White Pony efforts, while including their White Pony-esque experimentation in the mix.
Bloody Cape showcases the best of every band member; Carpenter's trademark dissonant guitar, Chi Cheng's elegant bass lines that carry the verse along, Moreno's soaring vocals at their best. In
Minerva and
Good Morning Beautiful, we see Deftones succeed in creating two breathtaking mid-tempo beauties, but even here something seems amiss when effort is concerned, with
Minerva's bridge being an overlong repeat of the opening melodic guitar notes. And sadly, their rushing of the album removed the opportunity to utilize and realize brilliant ideas they would definitely have come up with had they, well... put in some effort. As the B-side to the
Hexagram single, we get to hear
Lovers, a song that wasn't released with the rest of the album as it wasn't finished at the time of the album's release. And as we listen to that somber guitar riff, complete with elegant synthesizer weaving in and out of the instruments, form up a brilliantly grim and bleak track, you get just a glimpse, a realization of what this album could have been, and for the most part wasn't, had they used more time.
And you know, at the same time, you can't really say that the tracks are bad; you can't point to any one track and just say "Yeah, this track? This track just sucks." And in the end, maybe that's for worse when it comes to Deftones' self-titled album. Somewhere between good and bad, pretty much half of this album is just that; painfully average. And while the album is nevertheless definitely pulled up by a number of blisteringly good tracks, average isn't what we expect from Deftones; we'd rather they be bad from trying than conventional, dull, ordinary, and mediocre from laziness. This may still be a decently good album due to those aforementioned good tracks, but in the end, good may just not be good enough for the Deftones.
