Piecing together Moreno’s lyrical motifs is a far more abstract exercise, much like his words themselves. “Hearts/Wires” is a textural masterpiece, guitars layered into a swell of audio orgasma, and it houses the album’s most memorable guitar-vocal interplay, as Moreno’s voice drifts into a falsetto as Carpenter’s feedback swell tails into the upper register. Overall, Carpenter does have less room to get wild over the tracks on Gore - the lead guitarist perhaps alienated by these new songs requiring less lead guitar - but his specific parts require nuance, and he doesn’t waste a note, delivering striking melodies and riffs when he does get the spotlight. “Doomed User” opens with a huge bass line and a groovy heavy metal riff before a glorious foray of chords open into a blissful chorus and Moreno’s spine-chilling hook (“Don’t deny it”), the finest on the album. This results in a satisfying point-counterpoint in the song structures. Clearly influenced by his side projects Palms and Crosses, Moreno is content to steer the songs in more atmospheric directions, with Carpenter wrangling him back in with the riffs and overall power of his guitar playing. The duality between Moreno and Carpenter is evident from there on out, a writing process that Moreno described as a “competitive.” Carpenter even told Ultimate Guitar that he didn’t want to play on the album initially because of the direction the sound was going in.
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“Prayers/Triangles” is a surefire opener, drifting between spacey guitar lines, Moreno’s coos, and a brutal post-chorus breakdown that’s all riffs from Carpenter. Produced by Matt Hyde, Gore is an amalgamation of the darker vibes of 2012’s Koi No Yokan and the tight, experimental arrangements of 2010’s Diamond Eyes. It comes down to basic artistic direction: Write killer songs that work on their own terms, then let the recording process accentuate those songs and color them aesthetically - not the other way around. Deftones are the antidote to this, combining the already idiosyncratic songwriting efforts of Chino Moreno and Stephen Carpenter with that aforementioned digitized production. On the surface, a shitty song can be masked in beautiful production and still be a beautiful song as long as it hits the desired mood, sonically. Gore arrives at a time of a pervasive aesthetics-over-substance trend in rock, where everything sounds so perfect, so calculated, so pleasant (the inevitable product of our digital recording age). I can confidently call them a legendary band, and more and more listeners become privy to that legacy with each album cycle: “Oh, this is good. But because the band never strayed from its artistic values or impeded its own undeniable urge to create visceral, romantic heavy music (Deftones always sound like the Deftones and nobody else), they’ve outlived all the shit they came up with, that whole ’90s alt metal scene.
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Ten, 20 years ago, they were an anomaly of modern rock radio - the good band among the bad, caught in the tide of nu-metal and various flavors of the month. Every few years, Deftones drop a remarkable record, methodically building an empire of cred and acclaim that’s taken them a career to accumulate. Honestly, it shouldn’t come as a surprise. When so much rock music in 2016 feels dead, vapid, and recycled, here comes an album so vividly alive and inspired that it could turn even the most curmudgeon-y doomsayer into a worshipper of the guitar once again. Are you as high on Gore as he was five years ago? Read on to revisit that review.ĭeftones’ eighth studio album, Gore, is a stunning achievement. Noted for the creative tensions between frontman Chino Moreno and guitarist Stephen Carpenter during recording, our own Jon Hadusek argues in his album review, which ran the day of release, that these tensions actually led to yet another Deftones classic.
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Editor’s Note: Five years ago, on April 8th, 2016, alt-metal vets Deftones dropped their eighth album, Gore.