Deftones

The end of the millennium was approaching, along with all the emotional, individual and collective tensions simmering beneath the surface. Before long the world would change once again in irreversible fashion, flooding Generation X with rage, powerlessness and frustration all over again. The charts and MTV rotation were dominated by Limp Bizkit, Korn and System of a Down, but also by the debuts of Queens Of The Stone Age — born from the ashes of Kyuss — and White Stripes. Rage Against The Machine had just released "The Battle Of Los Angeles" (Epic, 1999). The so-called nu metal scene, heavily influenced by Faith No More, was at its absolute peak and would soon burn out for good, never able to return given the lucky astral alignment that had made it possible in the first place. Out of this often shapeless mass — especially when it came to the "clones" scattered across radio and TV (one example above all: Papa Roach) — emerged the singular profile of a band capable of blending metal and shoegaze, post-hardcore and dream-pop, "whispers and screams".

After the success of their second album, "Around The Fur" (Maverick, 1997), driven by the singles "My Own Summer (Shove It)" and "Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)" — staples of the rock clubs of the era — Deftones, despite the pressure, decided to take roughly three years, working in between tours, to complete the album that would go down as the masterpiece of their discography: "White Pony" (Maverick, 2000). The band, formed in Sacramento, California in 1988, was led by the charismatic yet introverted Chino Moreno, singer and guitarist, and had recently brought Frank Delgado into the fold to handle samples, synthesizers and turntables.

Between August and December 1999, the band shut themselves in the studio once again with Terry Date (Soundgarden, Screaming Trees, Fishbone, Pantera), splitting their time between Larrabee Sound Studios in West Hollywood and Plant Recording Studios in Sausalito, back in their home state of California. The first thing they settled on was the title: "White Pony", a reference both to cocaine and to the horse galloping through dreams as a symbol of sexual desire. The sound was masterfully built by channeling the powerful synergy between the driving drum grooves and electronic foundations steeped in hip-hop and trip-hop, the open, atmospheric guitars of Stephen Carpenter — with his trademark Drop-C tuning and a customized baritone guitar (ESP SC-607) — working in tandem with Chi Cheng's powerful bass and Moreno's vocals, poised somewhere between Mike Patton (Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, Fantomas) and Elizabeth Fraser (Cocteau Twins).

To truly grasp the uniqueness of "White Pony", and of Deftones as a whole, you need to check out the compilation "B-Sides And Rarities" (Maverick and Rhino, 2005), which hands us the key to the band's personal, experimental style through its choice of covers: Jawbox, Cocteau Twins, Helmet, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sade, Cure, Smiths and Duran Duran. An emotional, sonic cartography absorbed by the quintet over the years, a band that until then had thought of itself as writing purely "metal" albums, even though metal was never the only thing they'd had in their ears. So "White Pony" unfolds "along the edges" of this map, plunging the dark Cure of "Pornography" (Fiction, 1982) into the distorted, structured depths of Tool (an encounter that surfaces on the album in "The Passenger").

The album's strength and magnetism lie above all in Chino Moreno's all-encompassing performance, from the thousand emotional shades of his voice, split between outbursts of rage and measured sighs, to the narrative tension of his visionary lyrics. Pushed to the extreme by drug use, he paints death-haunted visions, erotic parties with knife collections, sensual electric baths and houses of flies somewhere between Franz Kafka and William Golding.

We recommend listening to "White Pony" in its original tracklist order, starting with the adrenaline-fuelled riff of "Feiticieria" and the full/empty, calm/turmoil dynamic that drives "Digital Bath", the song that has come to symbolize Deftones. Everything unfolds and shifts in just a few words, caught between the stillness of clean guitars and the sharp outline of the drums, where the kick strikes like a hammer to launch the chorus amid shoegaze-like flashes and searing bursts of distorted chords: "Tonight/ I feel like more/ Tonight I".

The album barrels ahead like a train at full speed, its sound imposing and wide-ranging, moving between the granite-hard, warped alt-metal of "Elite", the oblique industrial of "Rx Queen" and the atmospheric crossover of "Street Carp", from which trip-hop textures emerge in the soundscapes of "Digital Bath" and "Korea", as well as in the ballad "Teenager", the perfect vessel for the emotional hermeticism of Moreno's lines: "The more I scream/ The more it seems/ that I'm through".

The final five tracks round out the distinctive coordinates of Deftones' songwriting and sound — the blueprint that would be copied for years to come — including the only guest appearances on the album (setting aside the unconfirmed rumors that Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots contributed uncredited backing vocals to "Rx Queen"): "Knife Prty", a track with weird lyrics that endlessly contracts and expands between open chords and pneumatic fuzz, squeezing the sonic space down until there's only room left for the vocals of Moreno and Rodleen Getsic, singer and actress in future horror cult classics, in a modern, desperate take on "The Great Gig In The Sky"; "The Passenger", the album's least dynamic track with its massive, constant, fateful stride, stages the duet between Moreno and Maynard James Keenan (Tool, A Perfect Circle), paying tribute to the sheer scale of Keenan's own bands' music.

Right before the closer comes the album's first single, "Change (In The House Of Flies)", one of the Sacramento band's most iconic and, at the same time, most enigmatic songs, one that defined the record's sound. Sensual and unsettling, intimate and dark, "Change" opens with a verse that oscillates between the tonic and subdominant of C minor, building toward a chorus that hits you like a slap in the face, all clattering guitars and a wide, sighing vocal line:

I watched you change

Into a fly

I looked away

You were on fire

I watched a change in you

It's like you never had wings

Now, you feel so alive

I've watched you change

I took you home

Set you on the glass

I pulled off your wings

Then I laughed

I watched a change in you

It's like you never had wings

Now, you feel so alive

I've watched you change

It's like you never had wings

Moreno's voice finally lets itself become sound in "Pink Maggit", the track that closes the album, whose second section provided the material for one of the record's singles, "Back To School (Mini Maggit)", included on the album's re-issue, also released in 2000, and placed at the top of the tracklist as part of the compromise reached between the band and the label after the album debuted at number three on the Billboard chart in June.

With "White Pony", Deftones cast off the long shadow of nu metal and also break away from the alternative metal scene. The album not only had the remarkable ability to fuse past, present and future in so many moments, but, like few other records of its time, managed to give voice to the collective feelings of a generation through experimentation and the tensions running through the search for a personal, all-encompassing poetics within a broken world. That's why "White Pony" hasn't aged a day, existing entirely in the present tense, caught in that unresolved gap between "Pink Maggit" and "Back To School" where we listeners remain trapped alongside the band.

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20/02/2022