by Khagan Aslanov (@virgilcrude)
Private Music marks a very specific point in Deftones’ timeline. As far as I can tell, it’s the most hype the band have had surrounding a new album since the turn of the century’s White Pony. Against some very steep odds, I can hear kids in record shops talk excitedly about Deftones again. How they make the best love songs. How it sounds like a catchier, less progressive Deafheaven. How it’s the heaviest post-rock album this year. How they’re a great new discovery, and “where have they been all my life?” Obviously, to Deftones themselves, this is all standard fare. Unlike the rest of the holdovers from the past few decades, they aren’t cruising on inertia or nostalgia, or pushing forth for fear of being forgotten. They always knew this is what they were, what they made. They were always right here.
But the fact remains the Sacramento quintet now find themselves more fashionable than ever. One part of it has always been in the source material. Some scarce meat-headed hip-hop ventures aside, what Deftones always made was great doomgaze, before there was a word to describe it - metal that came from the same place as the odd-angled and despondent lust of the Cure and David Sylvian. The other part is that they’ve never fallen off and made a straight up bad album. In short, the listening world has finally caught up with what Deftones have been churning for decades.
They’ve had some sales and shows to show for it, sure. But it’s their aesthetic legacy that’s the truly enduring component. Stephen Carpenter using 7-string drop tunings to make something not just serrated and loud, but expansively romantic, has long been a learning bar to clear for any guitarist. The finer nuances of Abe Cunningham’s sneakily jazzy hat and snare work has eluded a generation of drummers. And then of course there are Chino Moreno’s vocals – by turns a dreamy croon and desperate screech, he continues to sing like there are pillars collapsing around him, the menacing love of a captive teenager.
Even to a casual listener or newcomer, moments like the hypnotic runout of “Souvenir,” the coiled ear-worming chorus of “Milk of Madonna” or the jittery heartrending quiet-loud progression of closer “Departing the Body” give everything there ever was to love about Deftones – a group of weathered Cali metal-heads, straining from skin to make something truly beautiful to score the end of the world.
Truth is, they’ve made better albums than Private Music. Hell, they’ve made better albums than White Pony (see Saturday Night Wrist). But they have never made it all sound so effortless. In many ways, they have never sounded so good.
Never mind the fact that contemporary doomgaze acts like Deafheaven and Nadja stand firmly on their shoulders, or that even the post-punk sensibilities pushing through the sludgy metallic clang of Chat Pile owes something to the tense push-and-pull Moreno and Carpenter’s instincts reach when colliding properly. You can even forget that they are the unlikely sole survivor of the reviled nu-metal era, escaping the decade and the scene with their artistic stripes intact.
It’s the fact that now, in their fourth decade of recording, Deftones are even able to sit together and put something like Private Music to tape, something so full of cinematic abandon and violent verve, coarse and beautiful, and as always, at odds with itself in all the right ways.