u, u, d, d, l, r, l, r, a, b, sele–omigodshutup

Chino Moreno is a source of hope for fat guys every­where. Or at least he ought to be. He’s living proof that it’s pos­sible to be over­weight and charis­matic, pudgy and socially-acceptable, grossly obese and a rock­star. He’s got the best pure voice in radio rock, he fronts one of maybe three bands cur­rently on modern rock radio that are worth lis­tening to, and I would guess that he’s prob­ably had sex with a girl or two. Not bad, right?

His band (the Deftones, stupid) are about to put out their fifth LP (blessed with the quasi-scene title Sat­urday Night Wrist). Now, given that Chino’s got such an emo­tive voice, it’s never been too sur­prising that the Deftones’ music leans toward the emo side of things. Unlike most of their cohorts at your local modern rock radio sta­tion, though, they rou­tinely pull it off without looking like total tools. Chino’s light touch with the lyrics (he tends to keep the ver­biage pretty abstract, even when the sub­ject matter is oth­er­wise obvious) is key here. The new album doesn’t change things up much in that regard, though the com­pletely obnox­ious “Pink Cell­phone” shows what hap­pens when someone other than Moreno gets a hand in the lyrics (they were sup­pos­edly com­pletely improv by the singer, Annie Hardy from Giant Drag). Word is that the song might be jet­ti­soned before the record hits stores–I can only hope so.

The pre­vious, self-titled LP was con­sid­ered a big dis­ap­point­ment by most every­body, espe­cially coming off of White Pony, the band’s most com­mer­cially and crit­i­cally suc­cessful release. I can say with con­fi­dence after just a couple of lis­tens that Sat­urday Night Wrist is a big improve­ment over the S/T (aside from “Min­erva”, which was untouch­able) but doesn’t come close to the highs of Around the Fur or White Pony. The thing that killed the S/T for me was its over­whelming sense of monotony and bland­ness. Even the afore­men­tioned “Min­erva” was, despite its bril­liance, sort of flat. I don’t know if this was a product of the album’s pro­duc­tion or if it had more to do with song­writing, but it com­pletely lacked the dynamics that made White Pony such a great ride. Sat­urday Night Wrist, for at least a large part of its run­ning time, brings them back. Here are a few pre­view tracks:

• Deftones — “Hole in the Earth”
• Deftones — “Rapture”

Those are the first two tracks of the album and also the best two to illus­trate the album’s two basic moods. “Hole in the Earth” is all ethe­real crooning and atmos­pherics and “Rap­ture” is all skull­crushery and near-hardcore-level yelping. Sat­urday Night Wrist comes out on the 31^st, and you can pre-order it from Amazon here. For some reason the explicit ver­sion is $0.02 cheaper than the clean one. Bizarre.

On the admin­is­tra­tive side of things, we’re working to get the LJ syn­di­ca­tion working again, pes­tering both the LJ helpdesk and our host’s as much as pos­sible. And as a side note, this is Girl­pants’ 100^th post. Hooray for us.