Deftones
private music
REPRISE/WARNER
Five years since their last album, Ohms, 30 years since their first album, Adrenaline, and 25 years since their seminal experimental-metal epic, White Pony, Deftones co-founders Stephen Carpenter, Chino Moreno, and Abe Cunningham still have the imagination to thrash, thrill, chill, and pummel. In a year that finds conceptual, mind-bending head-bashers such as Ghost and glam pranksters Babymetal happily topping the charts, it’s a raw-powered delight to hear Deftones throwing their weight (and Moreno’s oblique emotional lyrics) around on a scary, bottom-heavy album such as private music.
Enthralled still with their eerie early marriage of punk’s hardcore edge to metal’s buggy traditionalism with a Cure-like sense of shoegaze-dazed, spider-webby atmosphere (thank producer Nick Raskulinecz for a Santa-Ana-winds ambience, as he brought to 2010’s Diamond Eyes and 2012’s Koi No Yokan), the grueling “My Mind Is a Mountain” with its ritualized, spiritualized message rings out cold and clear through its dense wall of grind. Driven, as always, by drummer Cunningham’s rhythm-in-an-oil-can heft, Moreno’s gorgeous chorus line on “cXz” fights with that explosive pulse for attention in a bout where both sides reign victorious. If big, memorable choruses are your thing while dialed into vicious metal, “Infinite Source” and the slow, swaggering “Departing the Body” will soothe your beast.
Even Deftones’ decades-old leap homeward to the ugliness of rap-rock with “Cut Hands” manages to sound fresh and, frankly, explosive in a way you’d hate to admit. Likely, this is because each member’s strengths—from Moreno’s voice signaling sensitive machismo to the manner in which keyboardist and band oscillator Frank Delgado works to make Carpenter’s crashing guitars sound like chicken choker Adrian Belew, only crunchier—are on high alert, making private music a thing of brutal beauty.
