Thanks in part to Chino Moreno’s yearning, idiosyncratic croon (‘Beauty School’) and Stephen Carpenter’s gift for virile, brute-force riffs (‘Rocket Skates’) both reaching arguably career-best levels, that signature Deftones yin and yang feels like a therapeutic coming together of styles, their well established contrasts between light and shade all imbued with the same optimism and vitality.
Given the tragic circumstances surrounding the record – whilst working on the now shelved Eros, bassist Chi Cheng was involved in an awful traffic collision which would ultimately claim his life – it is worth noting that these tracks, whilst sometimes as brutal as Deftones have ever been, are also the band at their most uplifting. Indeed, this is a record which simply revels in sounding like Deftones, each of their singular sonic traits encapsulated in a filler-free forty-one minutes of thunderous metallic power and melodic fragility, and although some could argue that Diamond Eyes represents something of a back-to-basics approach, there is no denying the almost revelatory songwriting quality throughout, immediately apparent as the opening title-track explodes into action with its pulverising guitar motif and elegiac chorus.
Rescuing the band from a mid-noughties creative slump and some in-house, career-threatening personal squabbles, 2010’s Diamond Eyes represented less a return to form and more a haughty show of strength, an imperious display of focus and fire re-affirming just why Deftones managed to (unlike most of their peers) escape the nu-metal generation with credibility and renown still intact.
0 kommentar(er)
