Review by Josh Felty
Rating: Listen!
I've listened to much of Deftones music for a long time. I think one of the first time I really heard their stuff and appreciated it was their track from The Matrix soundtrack, "My Own Summer (Shove It)", a song which got overplayed a whole lot on the alternative scene before it ever found its way into one of the greatest effects-laden epics ever. This year sees Chino and Company's latest, Diamond Eyes, on the market and thankfully, not much has changed.
There's a lot more harmonic layering in the Deftone atmosphere, gratefully not all of it smothered in that high-pass filter effect that dominates most of Moreno's vocals. Surprisingly, tracks like "CMND/CTRL" and "You've Seen the Butcher" ring with a newfound adrenaline, energetic hardcore sensibility. The rhythm section and guitar riffs absolutely explode as though they're dying to reach out and choke the living daylights out of denouncers. Grab a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and try on "Rocket Skates" for something truly mindbending, friends. And the viscous simplicity of "Sextape", swirling synths and reverb abound, paints a portrait of the serenity of the Californian coast.
After all is said and done, Diamond Eyes is a fortuitous--and refreshingly optimistic--new fork in the road for Deftones. Some of it, upon reading about the album's gestation, stems from bassist Chi Cheng's extended coma after a car accident in 2008. Chino says, "I don't like listening to people's problems -- I like music. Music has been smothered with that complaining since the early-'90s. It gets old." And he's absolutely right, even though much of everything that followed White Pony was moodier, darker (once thought impossible), most likely caused by constant studio tinkering and restructuring. This one demonstrates how the Deftones' combination of heavy and light has really come to fruition, all while redefining the sound of a band once thought to be venturing down a whirlpool of the "same old song and dance."