release date: Oct. 28, 1997
format: digital
[album rate: 3 / 5] [3,06]
producer: Terry Date, Deftones
label: Maverick / Warner Bros. - nationality: USA
Track highlights: 1. "My Own Summer (Shove It)" (4 / 5) - 6. "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)"
2nd studio album from American band Deftones following the debut Adrenaline (1995). The band is a quartet consisting of Chino Moreno as lead vocalist, Stephen Carpenter on guitar, Chi Cheng on bass & backing vocals, and with Abe Cunningham on drums.
Stylistically, alt. metal is at the heavy end of the foundation, where you also find bands like System of a Down and Marilyn Manson. I only discovered Deftones with the song "My Own Summer (Shove It)" which was part of the original soundtrack to the first "The Matrix" movie from 1998 and I have to admit that along with track #6 those are the album's highlights, as these tracks contain a good amount of aggressiveness and at the same time also have a harmonic side, which the album's other compositions simply lack. Both Marilyn Manson - who is admittedly more of an industrial rock act - and System of a Down play on the opposites of beauty and ugliness - somewhat in the manner as Rammstein, but where Deftones, at least in the band's early phase lacked the counterplay to the raw, the dirty, and the brutal, and then alt. metal just isn't one of my favourite styles. The '95 debut and the follow-up to this one, White Pony (2000) have roughly the same shortcomings, while on later albums the band, starting with Deftones (2003), where the simple title indicates a change in style, but also Saturday Night Wrist (2006), Covers (2011) and Koi No Yokan (2012) reveal a soundscape where the band partially succeeds in bridging to other styles thus creating something other than a brutal wall of sound.
Not recommended.
