Granted, there's some pretty good metal circulating out there in that amorphous space between the underground and the mainstream. There's a new Slayer album out. Mastodon's new mastopiece, Blood Mountain, will be available by the time this issue hits the street. There's a new Trivium album coming in October. Lamb of God's latest CD Sacrament debuted, astonishingly, at No. 8 on the Billboard album chart last week, selling around 63,000 copies. And Every Time I Die is still awesome.
So yeah, there's some pretty encouraging stuff happening.
But my God, there's a lot of dreck.
The cookie-cutter metalcore onslaught continues with no signs of incipient abatement. (Hey, now there's a great metal song title: This song is entitled, 'Incipient Abatement.' Arrrrrggghhh!") The world needs another band that sounds like Killswitch Engage like it needs a meteor impact.
What the world needs, really, is a new Deftones record.
Fortunately, the singularly unique California alt-metal quintet will oblige on Halloween with Saturday Night Wrist, its first batch of new material since early '03's self-titled opus.
Extremely fortunately, as it turns out, because the group very nearly didn't finish the full-length.
It nearly called it quits instead.
"Oh, yeah," says Deftones bassist Chi Cheng, when asked if he ever seriously thought the band might be done at any point during the past three years. "For about a whole year. It was pretty lame."
Long stretches between releases became part of the Sacramento quintet's methodology a long time ago. Three years similarly passed between Deftones' immaculate '97 breakthrough album Around The Fur and its highwater-mark follow-up White Pony; three more went by before the aforementioned eponymous effort appeared.
"We're very relaxed as a band, for one thing," Cheng explains. "We've talked about [writing and recording] fast, and it's just that some processes take a long time. We're getting more meticulous with our material, too. Each member is always trying to bring more to the table, and it just tends to drag out."
This time was admittedly different, however; the making of Saturday Night Wrist seemed troubled from the beginning. The band's initial recording sessions in Connecticut with legendary producer Bob Ezrin (Alice Cooper, Kiss, Pink Floyd) were cut short, and a war of words between Ezrin and Deftones vocalist Chino Moreno erupted in both the industry and commercial press. (The band subsequently worked with longtime collaborator Terry Date, friend/former Far guitarist Shaun Lopez, and engineer Ryan Williams in the course of finishing the record.)
Then, after a Christmas vacation at the end of 2004, the long-awaited CD by Moreno's indie-rock/trip-hop side project Team Sleep finally saw the light of day. The singer announced Deftones would be put on hold while he toured and promoted the venture.
While Cheng says that a longer break was needed, because everyone was "too close to the project," it's well known that Moreno's ill-timed Team Sleep activities were the cause of the friction that almost undid the band.
"You know, we were pretty much done with a lot of the music," says Cheng. "So mainly, it was just us sitting around and being pissed off and waiting for Chino."
Eventually, fences were mended, and a reinvigorated Deftones finished Saturday Night Wrist before joining longtime friends Korn (to whom Deftones has been ceaselessly and inexplicably compared throughout its decade-long major-label career) for the venerable heavy-sounds jaunt known as the Family Values Tour. Though fans are getting two or three songs from Wrist every night in a live setting, they'll have to wait until the end of October for a full dose. The band's label, Warner Bros. subsidiary Maverick, has been understandably paranoid about parting with advance copies of such a highly anticipated album (read: music writers for free weeklies in markets like Tampa don't get one).
But if the alternately soaring and crushing first single "Hole in the Earth" is any indication, Wrist backs off the more straightforward pummel of Deftones in favor of a return to the inimitable, ambitious balance of ethereal melody, moody atmospherics and punishing groovecore that defined the band for so long.
"It's already getting more comparisons to White Pony than anything else," Cheng says. "We don't like to be categorized, even within ourselves, but at the same time, I think it's got more depth, it's more melodic and less linear than the last album."
Saturday Night Wrist will be released into a metal scene drastically altered from the nu-metal-dominated environment amid which Deftones made its bones and thrived. Many of the younger acts currently erasing the lines between metal sounds and punk-and-hardcore skate culture have undeniably been influenced by early Deftones to at least some degree. One might expect that a veteran act returning to the fray after a long absence would have been keeping its ear to the ground and its eye on both the competition and emerging trends.
"Absolutely not," says Cheng. "I don't pay any attention to that stuff. I don't listen to that kind of music anyhow. We're too self-indulgent for that. It's just not really important to us. Our whole goal is to make music we're all happy with, which is important enough. And if we're happy, we figure our fans will be happy with it, too."
This article appears in Sep 13-19, 2006.