Hard bargain

The Deftones deliver the goods

by Sean Richardson

For all the bitching that still goes on about the death of alternative rock, it's hard to object to the new-metal beast that devoured it on purely aesthetic grounds. Korn, Limp Bizkit, and the rest of their greasy brethren are continually taking inspiration from the heavier end of the alterna-rock spectrum to unearth new approaches to sound and songform. Problem is, the new-metallers have rejected alternative rock's moral conscience outright, replacing it with (gasp!) the good old-fashioned machismo of the pre-Nevermind era. Maybe rock isn't supposed to have any redeeming social value. But for anyone who ever cared about alterna-rock, it's more than a little depressing to watch the next generation act as if none of the music's idealism ever mattered.

More than any of the other new-metal titans, Sacramento's Deftones seem to have gotten alterna-rock's message along with its music. Since debuting in 1995 with Adrenaline (Maverick), they've let off as much anger as any of their contemporaries without ever resorting to misogyny or braggadocio. Singer Chino Moreno has even gone on record about his love for girly-men like Morrissey and the Cure's Robert Smith. If Nirvana were the Guns N' Roses it's okay to like, as some clever journalist once put it, the Deftones are the Korn it's okay to like.

On their new Maverick disc, White Pony, the Deftones delve deeper into the wild mood swings they began exploring on their previous disc, 1997's Around the Fur (Maverick). Like some weird cross between Helmet and Radiohead, the band pepper their hardcore-influenced attack with strange flights of melodic fancy. And with his broad vocal range and penchant for drama, Moreno emerges as the most compelling singer of the new-metal generation. He's got all the scary stuff down, screaming on "Elite" and "Korea" and hissing like a diseased cat on the chorus of "Knife Prty." But it's when he actually starts singing -- over the lurching groove of "Digital Bath," or with the gentle, high-pitched croon he uses on "Teenager" -- that he leaves pretenders like Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst in the dust.

Moreno has also grown as a lyricist on White Pony, which is a series of oblique narratives that deal in violent fantasy and twisted romanticism. It's a dark album, but Moreno doesn't write overtly about the demons in his head, the way most of today's metalheads do. The grinding "Street Carp" is as cryptic as any old Smiths song: "Here's my new address/664/Oh, I forget" is its main hook. Moreno goes on about some girl with gold teeth in the verses, then starts yelling "Did you get it?/Write it down!" as the band speed up and the song fades out short of the three-minute mark. The rest of the songs here are similarly concise -- until the end of the disc, when the band get all art-metal with the grandiose "Passenger," featuring Tool's Maynard James Keenan on vocals, and the eerie seven-minute finale, "Pink Maggit."

The Deftones didn't play either of those tunes at their sold-out gig last Saturday at the Palladium in Worcester. As ambitious as the band are on disc, they know the point of live metal is to get bodies flying through the air, a feat they accomplished handily. The bristling opener, "Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)," was followed closely by their other big parenthetically named hits, "My Own Summer (Shove It)" and the current "Change (In the House of Flies)." In the Palladium's relatively intimate confines, they put on a straight-up hardcore show, with Moreno thrusting his mike into the crowd and occasionally hopping into the pit. The band played several of Adrenaline's rap-metal shitfits, which have little in common with their recent stuff but worked as energetic crowd pleasers. Their first hit, "Bored," came to a particularly vicious climax.

They held back most of White Pony until the end of their set; the energy level came down a bit but the music lost none of its impact. Moreno played guitar on almost all the new stuff; bassist Chi Cheng added background harmonies to the uplifting vocal hook at the end of "Change (In the House of Flies)." DJ Frank Delgado turned out to be the band's secret weapon, fading sound effects and looped samples into the mix and performing zero showoff scratch routines. His subtle sonic colorings anchored "Digital Bath," a Moreno vocal showcase that broke into the night's most delightfully bombastic chorus. Girls started throwing themselves at him during "Knife Prty" as he leaned into the crowd to sing the galvanizing line "In here/We're all anemic." It was a beautiful losers' anthem that evoked another time, and for one night in the uncaring world of modern rock, the nice guy got the girl once again.