o What: Deftones, in concert. The band is opening for Alice in Chains.
o When: 7 p.m. Oct. 9.
o Where: Memorial Coliseum, 300 N. Winning Way, Portland.
o Cost: $35-$49.50 through the Rose Quarter, 877-789-7673 or http://rosequarter.com.
Few people would have blamed the Deftones if the group’s new CD, “Diamond Eyes,” had been a dark and depressing album. The past decade has not been kind to the group.
First there was the ordeal that was the making of the group’s 2006 CD, “Saturday Night Wrist,” a project that began more than three years earlier and saw tensions reach a point where the group nearly fractured.
Then in November 2008, bassist Chi Cheng was in an auto accident that left him in a coma. His recovery has been slow.
“He’s out of his coma, but he’s still in a semi-conscious state, which means he wakes up and he sleeps. … But he has yet to really communicate,” Deftones singer Chino Moreno reported in a recent phone interview.
o What: Deftones, in concert. The band is opening for Alice in Chains.
o When: 7 p.m. Oct. 9.
o Where: Memorial Coliseum, 300 N. Winning Way, Portland.
o Cost: $35-$49.50 through the Rose Quarter, 877-789-7673 or http://rosequarter.com.
The band shelved a CD — called “Eros” — that it had nearly finished before Cheng’s accident and instead started from scratch on the recently released “Diamond Eyes.”
And yet “Diamond Eyes” doesn’t sound like the work of a dispirited band. The band sounds energized — perhaps even reborn — and the lyrics on the new CD are decidedly positive.
That mood was not an accident.
“I think it was expected from everybody that we were just going to go with this dark record, with this sad record and this kind of pity kind of record, where at this point, I feel like although this happened to us, there are so many worse things (that people go through),” the vocalist said. “I felt kind of empowered to show that life is going to go on, and Chi is going to fight and we’re just going to make some (great) music.”
Given the turmoil that marked “Saturday Night Wrist” and the loss of Cheng, there was plenty of speculation that the Deftones would simply pack it in as a band.
But Moreno said nobody within the band (the other members are drummer Abe Cunningham, guitarist Stephen Carpenter and keyboardist Frank Delgado) wanted to end the Deftones.
“We sat around and talked about Chi for a good couple of hours, but not really about what we planned on doing as a band,” Moreno said of a key meeting. “It’s like we sat there and talked, and everybody got a lot of things off of their chests, their thoughts and what we were thinking about Chi. And when we were done with that, everybody just gravitated toward their instruments and picked them up and we started to play together. And that was, I think, the most therapeutic thing at the time for us to do. There was no really talking needed. We started playing.”
That very day the band called longtime friend Sergio Vega, a bassist, to see if he could play with them, Moreno said. “He came out the next day and that was it.”
It took only a few months to finish “Diamond Eyes.”
Early energy returns
Moreno feels the Deftones recaptured the energy and attitude that existed in the band in its early years (it formed in 1988 in Los Angeles), for the early albums “Adrenaline” (1995) and “Around the Fur” (1997).
The new album possesses the signatures that made “Around the Fur” (and Deftones music in general) stand out in the first place — the mix of thick angular guitar riffs melting into melodic choruses, coupled with a fierce rhythmic attack and fierce vocals powering many of the songs through the verses. The group, though, sounds especially inspired on “Diamond Eyes,” delivering passionate performances and some of its strongest song writing on tracks like “Royal,” “You’ve Seen the Butcher” and “Prince.”
The Deftones will have a prime tour to showcase the new material as the group fills the middle slot between Mastodon and headliner Alice in Chains on this fall’s “Black Diamond Skye” tour.
It’s hard to find a headline band that will draw an audience that will appreciate the opening act. But Moreno believes the current tour offers the rare perfect bill for his band, he said. “It feels good, it feels like it’s going to be fun.”
