Photo: Alberto Pezzali
“We’re bugging out!” yells Chino Moreno, surveying the sort of enormo-crowd you just don’t get by forging your own uncompromising experimental psych metal path for three decades. “We’ve been coming here for a lot for years but we’ve never seen this shit for us,” he grins, and his sense of pride and satisfaction can only be enhanced by the knowledge that California’s premier alt.metal pioneers have managed to clamber up Ally Pally’s vertiginous peak without resorting to making pacts with any nu-metal devils, a la Blinkin Park. DeftKornes, frankly, sounds more like a crippling fungal foot ailment than a face-melting night out.
The Deftones Arena Experience, after all, is far more of a textured, multi-layered affair, the sort of show that has gathered unto them a legion of thinking hard rock fans and saw them dubbed the metal Radiohead. If ‘Tempest’ opens with Moreno, backlit by a spidery spotlight, strumbling the sort of atmospheric guitar gothscapes that Robert Smith might have pulled out of his hair, it’s preparing the ground for the arrival of industrial rock chunder-riffs that are probably rattling Mir. If the epic roar rock of ‘Kimdracula’ and ‘Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away)’ occasionally gives way to the odd slice of oceanic Floyd (‘Phantom Bride’) and sensitive, melodic Smashing Pumpkins emoting (the cuddly, um, ‘Sextape’), it’s only to offset the copious bursts of math rock, rap metal and smatterings of goblin.
‘Passenger’ is Deftones’ only stray into the realm of indulgent prog metal meander and it's swiftly countered with an encore of barrelling melodic hardcore. Moreno’s fantasy fiction imagery of snakes, poison and gold-veiled temptresses is upended by the weaponised violence of ‘Rocket Skates’ – “GUNS! RAZORS! KNIVES!” read the revolving dot-matrix stage lights - and the night ends mulched between the grinding teeth of ‘Back To School (Mini Maggit)’. No concessions, no formulas, no gimmicks; Deftones do arena rock the way they’ve done the rest of their career. Their way.
