SO SO DEF

Bought the new Deftones disc, Saturday Night Wrist, at lunchtime. Produced by Bob Ezrin, though damn if I can tell what he brings to the table that Terry Date, their prior collaborator, didn't. A little more fullness in the bass sound, maybe. SNW might be the most openly indebted to the Cure's Disintegration of all their albums, too. In any case, their nü-art-metal cred stays immaculate. On first listen, it's impressive as hell - proggier and gloomier than almost every track off their last "real" album except for the single, "Minerva," and that one got old fast; something about the way Chino howled "And God bless you all" just grated on me. I didn't start paying attention to these guys till White Pony (I liked "My Own Summer (Shove It)" but didn't go all the way to buying Around The Fur), but when I did, I fell hard. They're one of the few can-do-almost-no-wrong bands around, to my ear (another being Amon Amarth, who I'm gonna write a whole bunch of words about sometime soon), and they're not nearly as big as they should be. Go buy this album.