Deftones were going through a particularly rough patch and Chino Moreno just had to vent: “I hate all my friends, they lack taste sometimes.” This wasn’t from an interview: it’s a lyric from “Hole in the Earth”, the lead single from their self-described artistic nadir, one where Dan the Automator, Kanye-skeptic Bob Ezrin, Ric Ocasek, and label-appointed song doctors were of no avail for a band that was alternately exhausted and apathetic. Meanwhile, their 2000 masterwork White Pony was plagued with so much in-fighting that Moreno admits, “it almost killed us.” This is worth remembering a decade later in light of how the leadup to Gore has mostly honed in on out-of-context quotes about how they hate each other’s taste sometimes. As with all of their best music, Gore is the brutal, beautiful result of Deftones being passionate enough to rip each other’s heads off.
More justifiable causes for concern were Moreno’s claims that Deftones were making studio-intensive “heady, outside the box” music, worrisome terms that could describe the various, underwhelming material he released with Palms, ††† and Team Sleep since 2012's Koi No Yokan. It’s somewhat surprising that Deftones would want to dig their heels in after being in a groove: Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan are strong records, but a lot of the praise felt fueled by relief. The band had proved capable of functioning after a devastating accident left founding bassist Chi Cheng in a coma until his death in 2013, reemerging from their post-White Pony wilderness period with the ability to write hooks again, and their longevity had vindicated their relative critical acclaim and commercial failures compared to the likes of Korn and Limp Bizkit. But their “return to form” felt a bit too literal, and for all of their attempts to distance themselves from nu-metal’s He-Mook posturing, Koi No Yokan’s “Tempest” still did a very convincing job of soundtracking an auto-erotic Vin Diesel montage in Furious 7.
Moreno perhaps sensed they’d exhausted their decades-tested “five guys in a room” format and Deftones entered the studio with no written material and no real timetable. Rather than sapping them of their immediacy or energy, the protracted, Pro Tools-y composition of Gore ensured they didn't have to rely on old patterns or just finish the damn record already. Sound manipulator Frank Delgado reasserts himself on the most texturally luscious Deftones record yet, layering shakers, backmasking effects and dessicated vocal filters onto the shapeshifting bad trip “Acid Hologram”; while Jerry Cantrell dishes Dirt on the bluesy first half of “Phantom Bride”, Delgado pulls the coda down a black hole of grinding ambience. And while the maddening, math-rock rhythms of “Geometric Headdress” and “(L)MIRL” will push drummer Abe Cunningham to his physical limits in a live setting, the arrangements themselves clearly feel like the result of man-machine interplay.
There’s still plenty of the palpable tension between Moreno and Carpenter that drives Deftones records and sometimes derails them. But where previous records tended to isolate their conflicting desires into separate songs or allot them to standard verse/chorus dynamics, both Moreno and Carpenter achieve a compelling standoff throughout Gore. “Hearts/Wires” was the song that prompted Carpenter’s red-flag-raising remarks, and it does recall a more shapely take on Moreno’s Isis-featuring Palms project. Carpenter takes out his frustration on the rest of Gore, as the riffs on “Doomed User” and the title track hit with astonishing, almost atonal brute force. His work on Gore is equally reverent of Meshuggah and the ’80s iterations of Maiden and Metallica, a layering of black-, leather- and denim-metal similar to Deafheaven's New Bermuda. It's a flattering comparison that still manages to demonstrate Deftones' unique presence: they do this in the context of songs that could conceivably be played on rock radio.
Emphasis on conceivably, though—Gore lacks a crossover shot as transcendent as “Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)", "Change (In the House of Flies)", "Minerva" or “Digital Bath", but there’s a satsifying, nasty, seething edge to “Prayers/Triangles” and “Doomed User” that their post-Chi singles lacked. Still, Gore is easily Deftones’ most engaging record since White Pony, filled with carefully crafted hooks disguised as bridges and transitions; even the requisite, rangier late-album cuts aren’t subject to the drifting coo that Moreno relied on to fill out verses before the inevitable piledriving chorus.
If Diamond Eyes and Koi No Yokan were a vindication of Deftones’ formula, Gore captures the inimitable essence of the band: the thing that makes people reference them when discussing Deafheaven, Sigur Ros’ Kveikur or basically any heavy rock album that strives to be prettier than its peers or vice versa, a truly new metal that’s sensual without resorting to shoegaze tropes, aggressive and unconventionally freaky in a way that never suggests predation or regressive machismo. Synaesthetically speaking, it’s a smear of pink, purple and black, a kiss that bites down on your lip to draw blood. By no means did Deftones invent the idea of combining brutality and beauty in metal, although they were definitely at least a decade ahead of the curve on covering Sade. Nothing short of a name change will likely convince skeptics at this point, but Gore proves that Deftones can remain vital as they are relevant, if they don’t kill each other first.
