With shimmering guitar washing over Madison Square Garden, Deftones singer Chino Moreno snaked his way to the front of the stage. He took in the cheering crowd for a few seconds from atop a speaker before jumping off just as the band exploded into motion and pandemonium ensued. The audience knew exactly what was about to happen, and that’s what made it so much fun.
Delivery after anticipation is pure dopamine for fans at a rock concert. Once a song has been etched into your brain from enough listenings, you know when to jump, shout and sing along. Popular rock musicians walk a tightrope between giving fans the hits they crave while developing newer material that keeps themselves engaged and reflects their own evolving sound and tastes. The Deftones’ North American tour offered three distinct ways to manage this.
Fleshwater: The Up-and-Comers
Before the main act took the stage, the sold-out crowd got two opening acts. Despite their only album being titled We’re Not Here to Be Loved, young Fleshwater were eager to make a splash and win more fans. It helped that they sound like a faster and more streamlined version of the Deftones. Frontwoman Marisa Shirar’s ethereal wails over gloomy guitar cast an eerie calm even during the most propulsive moments.
The entire band stood at the very front of the stage with maximum exposure to the audience, despite the weird platform angles leaving those at stage left with only a side view. They were the only band that directly encouraged the crowd to jump more and even run around in circles. Only half the audience was present at this point, but those in attendance happily obliged. I heard lots of positive commentary around me when they finished.
The Mars Volta: Better to Lose an Audience than Chase One
The Mars Volta are the most clearly influenced by progressive rockers King Crimson of any major rock band that’s emerged since the 90s. Their songs from 2002-2012 meandered all over the place for up to 20 minutes, played in barely countable time signatures at the driving speed of punk rock.
None of that was part of their show tonight. After a 10-year hiatus, guitarist Omar Rodriguez-Lopez and singer Cedric Bixler-Zavala restarted their band with an unrecognizable sound. Their 2022 self-titled album is Latin-tinged, jazzy pop rock with shorter songs, playful melodies, lots of congas and shakers, and minimal distortion.
But the Volta didn’t play anything from that album either. Instead, they debuted an unreleased new album in its entirety without ever explaining what they were doing to the crowd. The album, which will be called Lucro sucio: Los ojos del vacío, was in a similar latin pop vein but with more dissonant noise breaks between lyrical passages. Sauntering grooves gave way to minutes of whirring and feedback before another verse or chorus came into view.
The Mars Volta’s stage presence itself reflected an inward focus. The keyboard and percussion setups formed an impenetrable circular perimeter, with Cedric and support vocalist Teri Gender Bender shuffling salsa steps at the front. Omar stood grinning in the middle, strumming in Pete Townsend windmills and swinging his guitar around like a Fourth of July sparkler, though it was often hard to tell which sounds were actually coming from it versus the synthesizers.
The moment their last song was finished, they walked offstage to polite applause. No “thank you”, no waves, no bows. Some heads bobbed along with mine, but many people were buried in their phones. The lines to buy Deftones merchandise or use the bathroom were said to be particularly long during the Volta’s set.
The Deftones: Bridging Past and Present
As headliners over three decades into their career, the Deftones had the crowd in their hands from the start. A recent TikTok-fueled surge in popularity introduced their moody catalog to a new generation. Their first performance at Madison Square Garden was full of teens and 20-somethings singing lyrics half written before they were born.
The Deftones’ sound is driven by a tension between singer Chino Moreno, influenced by 80s new wave bands like Depeche Mode and female vocalists like Sade and PJ Harvey among other things, and guitarist Stephen Carpenter who just wants to shred heavy metal. The resulting songs are equal parts sensuality and savagery. The Deftones were initially grouped in the “nü metal” wave that dominated the late 90s because their first album mixed rap and spoken-word vocals with metal riffs, but they quickly dropped the rapping and moved into more abstract territory better described as “shoegaze metal”. That is, it’s metal in slow motion, where the distorted guitars create a wall of sound whose effect is more dreamlike and spacey than angry. Their slow tempos draw comparisons to Pink Floyd. Carpenter has continued adding strings over the years, always on the bottom end, to the point where he can now play lower than the bass on his 9-string guitar.
Their opening number, 1997 single “Be Quiet and Drive”, was a classic example of the Deftones’ sound. Chino moaned, crooned and screamed like he was on the verge of tears as the guitar repeated a hypnotic drone, simultaneously soothing and invigorating.
With other musicians hidden to the sides, the stage became a giant runway for Chino, and he used every inch of it. The 51-year-old was a ball of fire, spinning, sprinting, leaping and ducking from every corner to the other whenever there wasn’t a guitar in his hands. “Can we get the house lights on? Let’s have a look,” he asked a couple times between songs, carefully scanning the entire crowd as if to make sure everyone was along for the ride.
They played plenty of fan favorites, but managed to include at least one song from all 9 of their studio albums. Their career-spanning setlist kept both the audience and themselves from feeling “Bored”, which was also the title of one of their oldest hits played during the raucous encore.
The Deftones can be a sloppy band live. During transitions from quiet to loud sections, the drums sometimes lurched ahead of tempo before the rest of the band caught up. Nobody seemed to care, though, because the energy was consistently electric.
I saw mosh pits for the first time since the early 2000s. For the unfamiliar, a mosh pit is a cathartic pocket of people (mostly dudes) jumping and slamming into each other. Extreme moshing can become violent and dangerous (e.g. Woodstock ‘99), but light moshing like this was a refreshing sign that people were fully in the moment instead of on their phones. The Deftones are fundamentally a loud rock band, but the audience cheered and sang the loudest during their softer numbers like “Sextape” and “Digital Bath.”
In the space between audience expectation and artistic evolution, this eclectic trio of rock bands each found their own landing spot. Fleshwater earned some new listeners, the Mars Volta challenged the audience to let go of the familiar, and the Deftones celebrated their legacy without letting it hold them back.
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