The Deftones may loosely be categorized as a “new metal” band, but they don’t play by new metal’s rules. Even before they took the stage Sunday at the Aragon, the quintet was already confounding expectations.
With a full house primed to blow like Mt. St. Helens at the sound of the first chord, the band sent a recording of a slyly effete pop song by the Smiths wafting through the public-address system. This wasn’t an aberration–a couple of nights earlier, the quintet had entered to the equally unlikely strains of the Flamingos’ doo-wop ballad “I Only Have Eyes for You.”
The bulk of the Sacramento, Calif., band’s 90-minute set charted its own course, as well. “Minerva” rolled out through a thick mist of guitars, notes vaporizing while Chi Cheng’s bass line prowled toward daylight. It illustrated that the Deftones’ plush brand of sonic violence owes just as much to art-rock bands the Cure, A.R. Kane and My Bloody Valentine as it does to Pantera or Slayer.
Singer Chino Moreno unleashed enough hell-raising screams to bring back Freddy Krueger for yet another sequel. But more often, Moreno favored a cavernous, reverb-drenched croon, the sound of a man trapped in a well with night closing in and hope fading. He sang of feeling numb, disconnected, lost. He’s the most dada of the metal screamers: sobbing, stoned and strangely sensual, as if trying to hold a half-dozen conversations at once with the voices in his head.
The Deftones magnified his plight with spacious, wide-screen music, augmented by a cinematically psychedelic light show–blood-red backdrops giving way to radiant blasts of white, and collages of color pinwheeling like dilated pupils. “Deathblow” evoked the moments before a spaghetti Western shootout with its hovering sense of doom and mournful harmonica-like drone. Frank Delgado worked the turntables and augmented the Mars-space-station vibe that crept through the show’s midsection.
The audience might’ve preferred a more linear and brutally direct brand of head-banging, but the Deftones are a band that prefers to walk a crooked path.
Openers Thrice and Thursday shared the Deftones’ ambition, but they’re far more awkward and earnest in their presentation. Thrice closed with one of its best songs, “Cold Cash and Colder Hearts,” in which a walk down a downtown street prompted a guilt-filled meditation on homelessness. Thursday singer Geoff Rickly threw himself to his knees, pounded the stage with his fist and declared that “music is my whole life,” as if he were auditioning for Bono’s job in U2. Thursday’s music strained so hard to make a difference it positively squeaked, as Rickly addressed the uncertainty of relationships between lovers, friends and nations in a paranoid world.