Prozac and Whimsy

If you’re lucky there is a moment at a gig, just right before the headliners come on where the audience will briefly hush and there will be a buzz from the walls of amplifiers that are waiting to assault you. It’s a rare occurrence but the feeling of electricity and anticipation of what is to come will stay with you forever.

I first saw Deftones on a warm March Sunday in Wolverhampton in 1998. My life was in freefall and I existed in chaos bouncing along from one disaster to the next surviving on music and gigs alone. I remember very little of any real importance from this period but I remember that night and I remember that buzz.

Deftones’ first album, Adrenaline, came out in 1995 and I missed it at first, but soon caught up to them after they piqued my interest with 7 Words on MTV. By the time Around The Fur came out in 1997 I was fully invested, living for the music and slowly making it my entire personality. By the time the tour came around there was only the music and the chaos.

27 years later and a lot has changed but somehow not as well. I’m not doing so great at the minute. The chaos mostly stays and lives in my head these days but I still seek that buzz. Everything is so hard and nothing I do seems to change anything. I feel so alone and invisible and constantly tired but there is always that buzz to chase and there hopefully always will be.

30 years and 10 albums later and I’m maybe not as devoted a fan as I once was but I’ll always give the new record a spin and you’re rarely if ever disappointed. And then occasionally they’ll come around and blow your fucking mind. This leads us nicely to Private Music.

From the opening crunch of My Mind Is A Mountain you know this is going to be something a bit special. This is a band who know what they do and do it exceedingly well. There are riffs that will bludgeon you and whispered vocals that worm their way under you skin before exploding into screams of passion and fury. Chino may be in his (early) 50s now but he sounds as good as he ever has, if not on better.

This is a band who were, rightly or wrongly, lumped in with the Nu Metal crowd. And while it is a genre I loved at the time they were clearly head and shoulders above their peers then and now they are entirely in a league of their own. There is no one else out there like them and they have no real right putting out a record THIS good so late in their career.

Come for Locked Club stay for the double whammy of I Think About You All The Time and Milk Of The Madonna. As long as there are bands like Deftones and albums like this creating that buzz to chase I know I’m going to be ok.