Deftones
Saturday Night Wrist
Label: Maverick
Release Date: October 31, 2006

Deftones fans mainly fall into two camps: Hard nu-metal Adrenaline (1995)/Around the Fur (1997) fans and post-punk industrial meets soaring vocals White Pony (2000) fans.

And when 2004 brought the Sacramento-based quartet’s self-titled fourth album, they tried to please both. Half cookie monster scream rock and half White Pony leftovers, few fans had their alt-metal appetites satiated.

It’s no wonder the process to pull together Saturday Night Wrist — Deftones’s fifth album coming out tomorrow — was anything but straightforward.

The group should have known booking the Morning View Studios (where Incubus officially mellowed and started sucking in 2001) would be a bad omen, as the drama of hiring and firing Pink Floyd producer Bob Ezrin unfolded amidst a torrent of Chino Moreno storm-outs, scrapped vocals and a myriad of unpleasantries.

The group eventually got their act together and now, upon listening through the 12-track disc, the result is anything but disjointed and forced.

We’re personally a big fan of the group’s entire catalog and readily welcome Chino’s seering White Pony vocal run screams to anything the group puts out. So on tracks like “Beware,” we were pleasantly surprised to find vocals melded nicely with a heavy, minute long guitar outro. Best of both worlds? Could it be? Check out “Rapture,” “Rats! Rats! Rats!”, which runs the vocal gamut with help from System of a Down’s Serj Tankian and Giant Drag’s Annie Hardy.

And them comes the single, which is no “Back to School,” but definitely improves on the “Minerva” formula and will hopefully bring the two fan camps together - into the mosh pit where they can beat the crap out of each other like the Deftones so desire.

“Hole In The Earth” audio streams: WIN, MOV, RAM; video stream: WVX.