Blood and Guts: Deftones' Chino Moreno on Gore
Deftones' Chino Moreno meditates on creative tension, artistic accessibility and why eschewing populism has served the Sacramento survivors well
Preposterously, Deftones have been recording and playing together for 28 years. If you do the maths – bearing in mind that the three remaining original members, Chino Moreno, Stephen Carpenter and Abe Cunningham, are all in their early to mid-40s – you come to realise that the shapeshifting mavericks were teenagers when they first started out. Normally, you’d talk about a band like this purely in terms of staying power; you’d talk about how remarkable it is that they’re still doing anything together, and marvel at the fact that so long in the spotlight hasn’t eroded personal and professional bonds.
The thing is, it’s not just that Deftones are still going; it’s that, nearly three decades in, they have very much found yet another creative stride. How many other bands, this far in, can lay similar claim to being in the form of their lives? The Rolling Stones might be past their half-century, but they haven’t made a truly indispensable album in more than four decades. With the release of Gore, though, Sacramento’s premier purveyors of atmospheric metal have now cut three LPs since 2010, each of which you could present a compelling case for being the strongest they’ve ever produced.
Out of turbulence (the band's well-documented fall-out around the sessions for 2006 album Saturday Night Wrist, which they've long since overcome) and tragedy (bassist Chi Cheng's 2008 car crash, long-term coma and subsequent death five years later), we find ourselves in the midst of Deftones’ most potent run of records. Early omens for Gore, though, seemed ominous, after guitarist Carpenter suggested in the press that it wasn’t the kind of record that he wanted to make.
“I was like, 'Motherfucker, those are some of your songs!'” laughs Moreno over a transatlantic phone line. “It took me a long time to get into his shit on this record, too, but that’s what I love about him; he questions everything, basically, and that’s a good trait. It drives me fucking crazy, sometimes, but it stops any of us from sliding towards complacency. It’s challenging, but it’s not what people have made it out to be.”
Fresh tactics in the studio
The ingrained belief among listeners has long been that Carpenter, a hulking, hirsute figure with an uncompromising approach to the volume dial, is very much the ‘metal’ guy in the band, and that Moreno, a man with considerably broader musical tastes and a style of delivery that can flip between sensual and savage in an instant, is the mellower, more melodic counterpoint to Carpenter’s appetite for sonic brutality. Somewhere in between, as the story goes, the creative magic happens. This might, The Skinny suggests, do a disservice to the rest of the group.
“Definitely,” says Moreno. “It’s nowhere near as black and white as that yin and yang of 'I like this, he likes that.' Everyone in this band brings their own ideas and opinions, and we all have different styles, and overall that makes this band the way it is. Sometimes we don’t see eye to eye in the studio – it’s not always easy – but at the end of the day, we’re not going to finish, let alone put out, even one song until we’re all into it. We’re all sitting here smiling at what we’ve accomplished, and I think we’re prouder of this record purely because it didn’t necessarily come easily. There’s a big payoff in that. If you’re doing a fucking jigsaw puzzle with a group of people, everybody’s going to have different ways of approaching it; one guy might like to do the corners first, and another might want to colour coordinate. That’s how we've always made music."
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The band made considerable changes to their approach for Gore. Rather than hole themselves up for as long as it took to get the album finished, writing and recording sessions were sporadic out of necessity. “It’s harder for us to get together these days,” Moreno says, “because it’s not like it used to be, where I could walk down the street and step into the garage with those guys. At the same time, it came from trying to find a balance between making music and just living life. At this point, it’s not like we’re too stressed out; we don’t need to put a record out because our career depends on it. The more laid-back we were, the more I found myself excited to get back together – they were these great short bursts of energy. Get in, boom, get it down, and then get out again. We didn’t wear ourselves out living in a hotel for months on end, and I think we’ve earned the right not to, the right to be able to work at our own pace.”
Still, just because they could didn’t necessarily mean that they should. Moreno himself is on record as suggesting that Deftones do their best work when they create quickly. “There was a little anxiety about taking our time with Gore, initially,” he explains, “but honestly, there’s still a lot of spontaneity, because we were never together for too long and we were just trying to capture the energy in the room. 'Alright, we’re here for ten days, let’s work our asses off and make some noise together.' It gave us the best of both worlds, because we’d go home and then revisit the material months later and we could reflect on it and refine it, but still retain that initial energy that we caught last time around. It helped us to put our best foot forward.”
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Moreno’s own role in the band has subtly expanded in recent years, and he plays more guitar on Gore than on any other Deftones record before it. He spent much of the downtime in between 2013’s Koi No Yokan and this particular LP recording and touring with his (considerably more serene) side project, Crosses, and in a recent Rolling Stone interview, he spoke beautifully of his enduring love for music – of how waking up in the morning and delving into new music transports him back to being a 12-year-old. His tastes and influences are broad, but when he writes for Deftones, they’re largely secondary to the inspiration that his bandmates provide.
“There’s tons of things I love and listen to constantly, but the biggest thing that motivates me to do my part for the band, as the vocalist and lyricist, are the other guys, and the music that we’re all creating together. On an album like this – which we started making two years ago – it’s difficult to point to external influences anyway, because my tastes are always changing and evolving. Plus, the last time I did that, the last time I picked out a single name, was when we’d just started work on Gore. I was doing press and mentioned that I like Morrissey’s solo records, and suddenly everyone’s like, 'Oh, the new Deftones is going to sound like Morrissey!' I mean, come on. Obviously not – I don’t have that kind of talent!”
Gore: a return to critical acclaim
Tonally, Gore is often a lighter record than either of its predecessors, which perhaps explains Carpenter’s initial disenchantment with parts of it; Diamond Eyes had a raw aggression that constantly threatened to burst through the studio polish (and often succeeded), while Koi No Yokan was a moody affair, thick with tension. Gore often tempers its heaviness with prettiness; twinkling guitars sit alongside belligerent rhythm on Prayers/Triangles, while Hearts/Wires quietly simmers to a slow burn of a chorus. Moreno acknowledges that this doesn’t necessarily equate to an accessible listen. “I think this is one of the harder records of ours to get into. It’s so complex – I’ve heard these songs thousands of times, and I’m still noticing little subtleties here and there.”
Even so, that hasn’t put off sections of the music press that, having given Deftones short shrift for years, finally seem to be paying attention again; the likes of Pitchfork's interest has presumably been piqued by the band's latter-day critical success elsewhere. In fact, it seems that a much broader coalition of websites and publications are again embracing the band. Not that Moreno’s bothered, particularly. “Do people really go to somewhere like Pitchfork and think, 'Oh, if they like it, it must be good?' I mean, I know that’s how they view themselves, but honestly, whether they or anyone else chooses to review it, I don’t care. If anyone did say something great about it, my instinct would be to take it with a grain of salt and say it’s shit!
"That said, I do understand that mentality, because we fucking hate a lot of shit too, you know? We try not to be too vocal about it, because if you haven’t got anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all, but when the five of us sit around together we’ll talk all kinds of shit about things we’re not into. We were having a conversation the other day about the fact that we’ve never played Coachella – we’ve never been asked. I’d love to play there, but there must be somebody there who feels like they’d lose cool points if they were to align themselves with us in any way. But, you know, what am I gonna do about it?”
Gore is available now via Warner Bros. Deftones play The SSE Arena, London, on 3 Jun and Download Festival, Donington, on 11 Jun
Win tickets to Deftones' Wembley show here