A Flight and A Crash

DC 22/07/09

A Flight and A Crash

As the saying goes, sometimes bad things happen to good people. That was my immediate response to reading recent interviews in which Chino Moreno and other members of metal group Deftones discuss the car wreck that plunged their bassist Chi Cheng into a coma. The band seem like good people, who have been, as you would expect, scarred and saddened by their experience. On that personal level, this has been a tragic turn of events and clearly all sympathies should be directed to those involved.

As well as the personal issue, I think there may be a musical loss here too, which while clearly insignificant in the broader context is also a shame. The loss is this – just at the time when the band were hit with Cheng’s crash, they may have been about to push modern metal forward again.

This doesn’t mesh well with the predominant critical take on Deftones, which is that they were late-90s innovators in the hard rock field who have since settled into a boundary-respecting groove. And this is true to a point – their self-titled record did seem a little stagnant and free of new tricks. However, this view also underestimates the brilliance of their last record, the unjustly overlooked “Saturday Night Wrist”, which was packed with excitement and innovation.

“…Wrist” met the unfortunate fate that some long-gestating works of art do – it became known more in relation to the tortured process of its creation than in terms of its music. The narrative surrounding its release was that the record was the product of a band riven by personality disputes and internal conflict – and as a result of this the vast majority of reviews failed to analyse it in any depth beyond saying “holy hell, it’s amazing this disc even got made!”

That was a mistake, as “…Wrist” got closer to achieving something than almost any other hard rock record has. That something is to capture feelings of romanticism, lust, longing, eroticism and craving, within the structures of modern metal. Metal has always been a useful channel for certain emotions – anger, be it political (Rage Against The Machine) or personal (Nine Inch Nails). Aggression (take a bow, Limp Bizkit). Pure sexual lust (Motley Crue). All of these emotions are relatively easily communicated by means of crunching riffs, spiralling solos an driving drumbeats. What metal has never been good at is capturing less extreme, more heady, more complex feelings – and particularly those relating to romantic love and longing.

This was where the genius of “…Wrist” sat. It’s swirling textures and melodies, topped by the gorgeous croons and screams of Moreno, began to paint those feelings. And it did it without sacrificing heaviness – in fact, the ferocity of the delivery system was crucial to the mapping of the more conflicted parts of the heart. Every minute of this record, from Moreno’s moans on Hole In The Earth and plaintive cries of “I’ll be waving goodbye” on Xerxes to Steph Carpenter’s mating-whale guitars on Cherry Waves dripped sensuality. This was underpinned by Cheng’s flexible, keening basslines, the musical equivalent of bedroom eyes. All of this is pretty hard to pull off while also rocking a moshpit.

And that’s where the musical tragedy of all of this bites. While “…Wrist” was a brilliant record, you felt that Deftones could have taken things still further. You hoped that they would be brave enough to try, rather than turning back to the easier task of writing musical that was purely angry or heavy for heavy’s sake. And then they revealed that their 2009 album would be called “Eros”, surely a sign that the band was rising to the challenge. How could a record with a title like that not explore the finer points of love and sex?

As a result of Cheng’s crash, however, Eros has been shelved. The band made the brave choice not to release the record, as Cheng had been such an integral part of its creation that the other members didn’t feel that it was right to play the songs without him. Instead, the Deftones are writing a new record inspired by his accident. I am absolutely sure that this is the right course to take, and I look forward to the record that they do release greatly. But the fact that that record won’t be “Eros” is a minor tragedy nevertheless, set against the backdrop of a much greater one.