Deftones
“Saturday Night Wrist”
(Maverick)

3 Stars

Deftones, or just tone deaf? True to form, the Deftones toy with disparate musical styles, continuing to reject the established rock archetypes to mixed success on their sixth album, “Saturday Night Wrist.”

The five-man outfit from Sacramento, Calif., presents listeners with a dichotomous sound typical of their previous work; from one track to the next, and even within the tracks themselves, lead singer Chino Moreno and his bandmates switch back and forth between heavily distorted hard rock intensity and near-electronic blissfulness. This being so, no matter what your music tastes are, you will likely enjoy half of this album.

Diving into their new album, one is instantly reminded of what defines the Deftones sound: at all possible turns where an uplifting note could appear, instead comes an aesthetic flat comparable to that of Nirvana. This creates a melancholia and an edge in the music, lending an air of unpredictability to the compositions.

The album opener and first single “Hole in the Earth” features Moreno’s fluctuating voice often slipping behind the rest of the track before soaring to a climactic pitch. As he sings the chorus, his voice evens out into a moodiness, both lyrically and vocally, that could easily be Coldplay’s Chris Martin.

Whatever calm this track creates is quickly shattered by the caustic screech dominating “Rapture.” In an era when the “screamo” genre is pervasive in loud rock music, the Deftones don’t do well in distinguishing themselves from the pack: Moreno takes a fairly well arranged guitar song and destroys it with the most painful and unartistic screaming imaginable. The track is a huge let-down, but it by no means defines the album.

“Cherry Waves” is as juicy as it sounds and is the high point of the album. The song itself is built on a simple, dreamy guitar intro that builds with Moreno’s voice before opening up into distorted guitar chords and serene, echoing vocals.

Later, “Xerces” is a laid back, journey-into-outer-space-type song. With the simple beat of the song and lazy piano chords in the verse, you can almost picture Moreno lifting off the ground as his voice echoes through the track. He even announces in the chorus, “I’ll be waving goodbye.”

But hold on, because once again the trance is shattered by the Deftones trying to cling to their played-out metal roots, screaming incessantly in “Ratsiratsirats!” There is little to say about this song besides their need to either send it to Slipknot or graphically kill it in a trap.

The final five tracks of the album, with the exception of the perverse, electronic faux-beat-poetic “Pink Cellphone,” underscore the Deftones’ overall difficulty with this album. While the group has mined the intersection of screaming and art with some success for years, they do so here incoherently. In trying to be too broad, they lose sight of what made them noteworthy in the first place: consistently good songs.