The Deftones

The Deftones Saturday Night Wrist (Maverick; October
2006)

The debut of the Deftones way back in 1994 with
Adrenaline was the debut of a new perspective on turn of
the century nu-metal. Maybe it was the way you couldn’t tell if
Chino Moreno (pictured) was singing about love or hate,
but they had a mystique about them that said they were going to do
something new. Twelve years and four full-length albums later, not
much has changed. Moreno still screams in inhuman frequencies, and,
if anything, the ambiguity of the Deftones has only reached new
depths with Saturday Night Wrist. Strangely, this is not a
problem.

One need only glance at track titles of Saturday Night
Wrist to find the post-modern element of this album. A spacey
love motif seems to perforate several songs such as “Cherry Waves,”
and “Xerces,” pausing in between for thrash-metal interludes like
“Rats!rats!rats!” and “Rapture.”

But the real essence of this album lies in the emotional timbre
of the instruments, and how the track as a whole feels, something
that is accomplished quite poetically by the drumming of Abe
Cunningham and the distorted Death Cab for
Cutie-meets-Korn guitar work of Stephen Carpenter. That being said, perhaps the real
aptitude of the Deftones lies in their ability to create images
with instruments, not words. Combined with intelligent
collaborations such as Serj Tankian of
System of a
Down on “Mein,” Saturday Night Wrist is 51 minutes of
kicking-and-screaming loveliness.