It was a few months ago, after I had a falling-out with a rather cruel young woman, when I found myself in the time-old blanket of every emotionally battered record snob: a drawn-out, 2 a.m. yelling match with my coffee shop-working friend, Evan, discussing our favorite records as nearby customers waited in silence for the swearing to stop. I was rattling off my favorites, only to remember I was forgetting one in particular, much to my horror.
I'd spent the last week emerged in "Kind of Blue," "August and Everything After," "Kid A" and "The Shape of Punk to Come." I'd taken first pick at the store the morning after the fallout with Dylan's confessional masterpiece "Blood on the Tracks." In all of my downtrodden listening, I'd stayed away from "White Pony" because I'd had my Deftones binges before, akin to the "man on an ether binge" Hunter S. Thompson talked about in "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas."
Usually consisting of one to four days of nonstop listening, sometimes to the neglect of social activity or sleep, Deftones binges hit like the barrage that opens "Lovers:" like a block of cement. Starting with the album "Adrenaline" and on through the latest, "Deftones," through b-sides, demos, live material and rarities, then re-listens, it doesn't stop until it's "over."
My love of the Deftones had always run deep ever since I discovering them in 1994, and I knew I had to keep my distance sometimes or the catalog would swallow me whole. Like any Deftones fan, it's taken me years to get to the point where I can wrap my head around the four albums they've given us. "Adrenaline" was always their quiet record for me and the hardest to figure out. "Around the Fur" is their brilliant second record and the hardest to date. And "Deftones" was the art record I wanted to see them make.
But "White Pony" always stood out for me. There's a sensuality and a violence, a pleading and a desperation, to "White Pony" that the band had seemed never fully able to place in previous recordings. From the high notes in "Digital Bath" to the shrieks and screams in the pounding "Knife Party," and the ferocity of "Feiticeira" (named after a Brazilian talk show in which men are asked difficult questions, and if they pass are allowed to perform non-sexual actions to the host) and the cough-ridden "Korea," "White Pony" is a trip through what no one expected was possible from a band that had done so much.
It's a picture of the band at one of its creative peaks and points of greatest tension. They were really moving and falling apart at the same time. "White Pony" is a testament of one of the best bands in recent memory on the brink of combustion.
"White Pony" is my favorite record of the last 30 years, maybe tied for all time. It's about the lines between sex and violence, artfulness and elitism. To me, it's an album about life. Since my recent entry into a relationship with a lovely young woman, I find myself listening to it as much as I did last February, when everything was falling apart. It's too complicated for just one application and too beautiful for labeling. Some of the band's best work was yet to come, but I can't help feeling an affinity for "White Pony" all its own, with the biggest love and the most violent fear.
Ian Maley is a freshman in the School of Public Affairs and a clerk at Crooked Beat Records in Adams Morgan.
