Saturday Night Wrist by Deftones
Saturday Night Wrist is the fifth studio album by the American alternative metal band Deftones. It was released on Maverick Records on October 31, 2006. Despite early contributions that were later scrapped, Saturday Night Wrist marks the departure of mainstay Deftones producer Terry Date. The band's fifth album was the product of an arduous and stressful creative process lasting roughly two years and straining relationships within Deftones. Complicating matters, and inspiring many of the album's songs, were frontman Chino Moreno's drug addictions and the crumbling of his marriage. The outcome, however, would be an album met with critical praise. This is the last Deftones album to be released with bassist Chi Cheng before his near-fatal 2008 car accident. Cheng continues to make a slow recovery as of 2013.
The Deftones' atmospheric metal has always reveled in a pitch-dark realm, one boiling over with murder ballads, the sadomasochism of a <i>Saw</i> sequel, and strange characters that wield knives for fun and change into flies as if they were knee deep in a Kafka novel. And so the story goes on the band's fifth album in more than a decade, a melodic but massive affair obsessed with redemption, religion and figurative battles that gaze inward and out. (Or are they literal? Chino Moreno's lyrics are still as obtuse as they are ominous.) All in all it's paranoid music for paranoid times, propelled by a poisonous backdrop that's less concerned with maintaining a heavy metal profile than one that's simply <i>heavy</i>. As in guitars that tremble and triumph, drums that sputter and spark, and subtle samples that color every blank slate in sepia tones. There are even a few vintage Deftones moments of Moreno shrieking and spitting like he's still on the second stage of Ozzfest ("Rapture," "Rats! Rats! Rats!"). Apparently, Sacramento's finest metallurgists haven't grayed as much as their hairs would suggest.
