Around the Fur (1997)

A few things I know about Deftones: They appear to want to eschew the definite article (like Shoes, a very different act), so don't call them "the" Deftones. The designation for those inclined to label is "Nu-Metal." They are from Sacramento. This is their second album, and it's on Madonna's Maverick label. Singer and guitar player Chino Moreno, the ostensible front man, has a hellacious voice to which prolonged exposure just might raise nodes on your own vocal cords. Careful here. Peers include Nine Inch Nails and Queens of the Stone Age. I found out about them at an outdoor festival in 1996, where they were playing the second stage in the middle of a sweltering high-summer afternoon. They appeared alternately nervous and juiced, with Moreno pacing and making casual jokes from the stage, in between fits of the band letting loose with the kind of thing you find here: atmospheric blasts and shards of mighty guitar noise across which Moreno's aforementioned vocals surf until they are swallowed by the eddying battering ram of sound only to reappear again whenever the flotsam clears. Only to be swallowed again. Loud, quiet, loud, open space, bludgeon, open space. A kind of stern black and white drama marked out in bold strokes. There was something remarkable about the juxtapositions of their scruffy appearance and the wall of sound and the jokes and how wrong the light and heat of the summer day was. The set didn't last even 40 minutes, but it's something I have never forgotten. And if I've never experienced anything quite like it again, in this or any of their releases I've heard, much less anything by anyone else, it's something I'm looking for again even still.