Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist

There are some things you’ll never quite get out of your system. And with all the unexplainable attraction of a long-lost girlfriend reappearing in your life, the return of Sacramento’s finest, Deftones, lures like few other bands, fewer still birthed from the nu-metal era.

‘Saturday Night Wrist’ was, supposedly, make or break for the ever-fattening Chino Moreno and company. The band nearly split in the wake of Moreno wandering off to work on ambience-filled – and, in the interests of honesty, frankly tedious – side project Team Sleep. It promised much, delivered less, and nearly destroyed one of the most accomplished exponents of intelligent aggressive rock that music has seen in the past decade.

As might be expected, such near misses have renewed the Deftones’ fire. Sharper than ever and thankfully, in the main, eschewing Moreno’s latter day tendencies to embark on scream-free attempts at haunting singing, ‘Saturday Night Wrist’ is the record the Deftones always threatened to make.

Admittedly there are no ‘My Own Summer (Shove It)’ examples of pure mosh-catalysing anthem, and the caterwauling brilliance of ‘Adrenaline’ is only partially returned to. Crucially though, there’s finally a fascinating fusing of at-the-jugular Deftones attack and less straightforward song structures.

Feelings are more mixed when single ‘Hole In The Earth’ begins the triumphant comeback, though: despite a handful of pummelling guitar sections that could be used to demolish condemned buildings, the chorus is a touch too close to the less engaging troughs of ‘White Pony’ for comfort. ‘Rapture’ immediately knocks teeth out in response, the sound of the Deftones becoming all they should have been long ago. Moreno’s mad with an unnamed fickle receiver of a song’s worth of annoyance and the results are, to put it simply, fantastic.

The Team Sleep influence does live on in ‘Saturday Night Wrist’, but in various pieces of isolation any trip-hop worship acts in context to the overdrive-fed explosions elsewhere. And there are only fleeting seconds where attention spans will begin to crack. Prominently, ‘Pink Cellphone’ has already been maligned in many quarters, not least for its curious narrative from patently filthy Giant Drag lady Annie Hardy. At four minutes the track echoes to a halt, and should really have ended there. The subsequent 60 seconds of bizarrely compelling dirt, judging by the snatches of background laughter, represents some kind of perverted in-joke but not much else. And what do we learn? British people have bad teeth because they’re all uncircumcised, anal sex addicts. Not guilty on at least two counts, your honour.

That utter oddness soon fades from view with the potent double hit of ‘Combat’ and ‘Kimdracula’, the latter especially ethereal and, like ‘Hole In The Earth’, seeming to revolve around themes of imminent global destruction. At least if those visions are realised the Deftones will be able to die with potential fulfilled.