Carpenter's guitar seems to be stuck in a locked groove, circling around and around as if it was only a sample (not an impossibility with the talents of Frank Delgado-but he had moved to keys instead of turntables). 'Needles and Pins' does not relent in terms of energy, but the sound is almost more spare, Cunningham's ever-interesting drum style would be skittering if it weren't too deep and low to be called that. There's a bridge where an electronically-affected vocal from Moreno is followed only by a lone guitar, but it all swings back to 'the same sound'. It's fascinating that it hits on the down-tuned aggression of their early days and the sounds they became associated with, yet marries them to the curious sounds of Carpenter's interesting opening riff. Chino works the verses up at the first and third lines to extended, periodically 'catching' screams, and exhausted second and fourth ones. The album opens with what would be the release's second single, 'Hexagram', which dances with a rather sunny set of guitars over a similarly bright low end introduction, which pounds downward after only a few bars as Abe Cunnigham's drums smash in with Chino Moreno's scream-'Paint the streets in white!' but there's still an interesting edge to the music: as thumping and powerful as it has become, it's still using that sunny riff as its primary focus, but the chorus changes that: 'Worship! Play, play.' Chino sings, almost mockingly, Stephen Carpenter's guitar and Chi Cheng's bass hammering out staccato, halting riffs that rock and roil but stop suddenly, eventually coming back out to an open spread that re-introduces the verse's sound. Small wonder-the band actually started in 1988 (!), and never really injected rap into their style, certainly not in the fashion that was so common at the time. Indeed, they'd left most of the sound behind on their second album (the aforementioned Around the Fur) after exorcising the great majority on 1995's Adrenaline. If anyone really and truly outgrew the (intentionally disparaging) moniker of 'nü metal' (as opposed to both not doing so or becoming the example of 'the good kind'), it is and was Deftones.

Many of the bands I listened to at the time will actually make appearances here-some surprisingly, some less so, but this is one of the ones I tend to get least nervous about. So this was the genre that, as its popularity was at its height, managed to ensnare my aggressive leanings, musically. I was never much of a fan of the other two bands, indeed, rarely listening to either, but I'd not yet been introduced to 'real' metal, and the strange reflexive responses ingrained in me from my father's distaste (Iron Maiden seemed like some distant, scary-like-a-horror-movie thing for many years, for instance) didn't encourage changing that. I normally try not to date myself, as it influences opinions about my opinions, but it's difficult to avoid here (as it has been on a few odd other occasions)-in 2000, Deftones' White Pony was released, their prior hit, 'My Own Summer' from 1997's Around the Fur having taken them up on the crest of the 'nü-metal' wave most typified by Limp Bizkit and Korn,¹ but, as with grunge and various other genres named for reasons of simplification (in the end, often rounding up disparate genres and slapping them under a single umbrella for marketing reasons, though there tends to be something shared), many bands didn't share the overt stylistic leanings of the flag-bearers. And then two records later they release 'Mind the Drift' and the sound is utterly HORRIBLE: dead, unvibrant, lifeless, overproduced, 'sheeny', fake, boring, etc.If you had known me in high school (and at least a person or two who reads here on occasion did), you would find this band's appearance none too surprising. Songs like 'Focus Pocus' sound absolutely amazing - so raw, so in your face, like anarchy shoved into your earhole. What is it that bands like the Deftones and Big Business can start off with such a beautiful raw sound and then grow into such a lifeless boring sound? I mean, Big Business' first release is PERFECT.

Still, I am curious to know what they used.I think the guitar sound Adrenaline - though not my favorite guitar sound ever - is worlds better than on the self-titled album, which sounds horribly lifeless like every other major label heavy rock record I've ever heard - the new Big Business record 'Mind the Drift' is equally as horrible sounding. It sounds like it was recorded direct with a POD. I really love the songs on adrenaline, but I've always thought that the guitar sound was horrid.

Deftones battle axe