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Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: Deftones :: White Pony
Columns Warp + Weft Warp + Weft: Deftones :: White Pony | Warp + Weft: Deftones :: White Pony |
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| Written by Steve McPherson | |
| Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 11:23 AM | |
 Deftones White Pony Maverick Records 2000 At the 3:00 mark of "Change (In The House of Flies)," Deftones bend time and space: There's a single open hi-hat beat that's bigger on the inside than the outside. In the movies, special effects can send people hurtling back and forward through time and make creepy, damp little girls materialize out of TV sets, but Deftones aren't using digital wizardry here—they're taking the laws of music and using them to blow up that single beat just a little bit. It's stunning for the same reason that scientists in Switzerland creating a teensy, tiny wormhole would be momentous: in a concrete world, it's the little impossibilities that fuck you up. Stream "Change (In The House of Flies)" below: That open hi-hat is the screech of tires before the accident, the gap between the gunshot and the impact, the hiss of wind in your ears between jumping from a great height and landing. If you've ever been in a car accident that you could see coming, you probably know how that moment between warning and disaster seems to slow down; in retrospect, it seems huge, brobdingnagian, a wealth of options laid out before that you couldn't choose, instead slamming headlong into something. Somehow, Deftones have managed to replicate that psychological effect in music. "Change" was the first single from Deftones' 2000 release, White Pony. When the album was initially released, it had 11 tracks and, of those, "Change" had the most linear verse/chorus, soft/loud structure, plus its chorus is in a major key—a rarity for Deftones. But then, at the request of Maverick Records, the band recorded a sharper, punchier version of the album's closing track, "Pink Maggit," and the label released it as the second single under the name "Back to School (Mini-Maggit)." Then things got really weird because they re-released the entire album with "Back to School" as the first track, much to the dismay of the band. You can see why they'd be upset; "Back to School" is clearly a throwback to Deftones' early association with nu-metal and rap rock and it's completely unbecoming to White Pony. It is not, actually, a bad song, but it's perhaps best to think of it as an appetizer or editor's introduction to the work itself, which exhibits an arc and scale that's extremely difficult to achieve. The album proper begins with "Feiticeira," and after guitarist Stephen Carpenter toothy and off-kilter riff is pummeled by drummer Abe Cunningham's explosive, stuttering intro, we're plunged into singer Chino Moreno's thick, black world with the line, "Stop I'm / drunk." The song's tale of seduction and kidnapping is a perfect introduction to the subtle shadings of the album's layers because, contrary to what you might expect from a band with as much blunt force as Deftones, the victim here is the male narrator. He's been abducted by a woman who throws him in the trunk of her car before taking him out to take pictures of him. (Not so incidentally, "feiticeira" is Portuguese for "female wizard.") "And my jaw and my teeth hurt," sings Moreno, "I'm choking from gnawing on the ball." But instead of distressed or anxious, the song's melody is soaring and keening, rising and falling like power lines alongside the highway at speed. It skates between major and minor, illuminating a major interval against the skeletal music at the beginning of the chorus before dropping off into a darker minor tonality. It is, at a very basic level, Romantic after the fashion of Beethoven and Gothic horror. It's tension, violence, and unease forged into something that threatens to overwhelm in an aesthetic way and it's an approach to the sublime that's rarely touched on nowadays in popular art. We're obsessed with the reality of violence—with either displaying violence in its most unvarnished fashion or attempting to control it to keep it from impressionable minds—having largely forgotten that art can provide a way to understand and explore the darker parts of our psyche. By his own account, Moreno didn't see the songs on White Pony as autobiographical; he was working with characters, and using them to plumb those dark recesses.  "Digital Bath," the second track, describes a little "r" romantic encounter, and Moreno sketches its outline with the barest of details: Seeing and staying unseen, breathing and holding your breath, warm water, foreign tastes. The soaring refrain could be lifted straight from an R&B slow jam ("Tonight / I feel like more"), but here it's imbued with an undercurrent of bitterness that marks that feeling as painfully temporary. Throughout the songs on White Pony, the various narrators' relationships to women, to their own emotions, to the world in general, is ambiguous and troubled. Moreno is more interested in evocation than explanation, careening through a wasteland of stingers, honey, carcasses, gold teeth, kings, queens, blood disorders, and this, from "Korea": "I taste you much better / off teeth, taste / of white skin on red leather / check the claws that we got." The record skates from the foundation-laying "Feiticeira" and the hollow shell of "Digital Bath" into the rise and fall of a masterfully tracked record. If "Digital Bath" is the band at their most sympathetically expansive, then "Elite" is them at their most crushingly forceful. "RX Queen" dials it back again before "Street Carp" slashes forward. "Teenager" marries a gentle drum machine beat to a tender acoustic arpeggio that's been smashed and taped back together digitally—a pause before the band shifts into the ambitious final chapter of the disc. Stream "Knife Prty" below: The songs there—"Knife Prty," "Change," "Korea," "Passenger," and "Pink Maggit"—reflect and extend the themes and structures from the beginning of the album. "Passenger" returns to the car setting of "Feiticeira," "Korea" links the loose rhythmic underpinning of "Digital Bath" to the brutality of "Elite," and "Knife Prty" vaults the confusion and menace of "Street Carp" into the stratosphere with spine-tingling vocals from performance artist Rodleen Getsic that recall Pink Floyd's "Great Gig in the Sky"—if that song were doused in gasoline and lit on fire. The way the songs link with and amplify each other is what lifts White Pony above not only other albums by most nu-metal band, but above Deftones' entire catalog. The band has here constructed an intricate web of darkness full of involuted twists and knots that pulses and breathes with both an organic and somehow supernatural spirit. "Change" is where the strands of the web intersect. Here, the disparate threads of the record—metamorphosis, displacement of identity, darkness, confusion—come together in a song that concentrates them into a thick mass. "Change" milks the soft/loud, verse/chorus dynamic for all it's worth, exploding back and forth before ramping up even higher into the secondary chorus on top of Moreno's keening wail. When the floor drops away under the bridge (which is really just a verse arrested in mid-flight), you're sent sailing our into open space, a space that's been created by the thunderousness of what's come before it. It's not a trick to play the soft/loud card, but what's tough is harnessing it to genuinely create tension. Most bands use the cathartic rush of the chorus to signal release (e.g. "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), but "Change" has a two-level chorus where the first is more crushing than liberating, and that's where that open hi-hat beat comes in. That cymbal crash is the release. If the bridge sets you adrift, that hi-hat sucks you back into the eye of the song, promising release for an instant before slamming you back into the first part of the chorus. When that first part winds up into the second part, Moreno sliding up from a minor key into a major one through every stop in between, the song pulls itself up into something bigger. It's something that a lot of bands aim for, but few hit: A crushing, bleeding climax built from the ground up. The record as a whole revolves around "Change," which is sort of the flagstone of White Pony. It seemed like Deftones were headed in some kind of bold new musical direction in the wake of their masterpiece, but while the self-titled follow-up and last year's Saturday Night Wrist were both solid records, they failed to propel the band forward. White Pony remains the band's high water mark—a moment when the band's ambition matched their mastery of moment to create an enduringly twisted and majestic statement. |
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| Last Updated: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 11:45 AM |
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