No. 23 Deftones – Around the Fur

I wrote off Deftones as a Nu Metal band without ever having heard them, I’d seen some articles in the music press and just said not for me, and wandered on with my life.

They got booked for Glastonbury ‘98 so I decided to give them a try and bought one of their singles in a record shop in Newcastle. I didn’t get to listen to it before the festival, so was floored when I discovered that Deftones were not Nu Metal and were fucking amazing live. (They covered South of Heaven!)

After the festival, we were sitting around my friend Andy’s place and I asked if I could put the cd I bought and discovered that I had bought Around the Fur for £2, not a single like I thought. So I pop the album on and chat away. Pretty quickly I noticed that I wasn’t listening to my friends, I couldn’t tear my ears away from this CD. When it finished, I asked if I could play it again, and they said sure, they hadn’t been listening but I had. And I was in love.

And what an album! I’m not sure I’ve heard anything like that separated guitar sound that opens the album. There’s so much space in that sound and the crash into the heavy section is world class quiet LOUD stuff. Chino’s switch from clean vocals to screaming is some of music’s finest and was a hell of an introduction to the band.

It feels like Deftones were one of the first metal bands to grow out of 90’s alt rock as much as the old school metal bands. There’s huge riffs but the song structures and rock hooks of much lighter bands. You can allso hear the influence of bands like the Cure here and that’s something that really made them stand out.  

Around the Fur is the sound of a band growing and morphing into something far more interesting than their debut suggested. As the world was drifting away from metal, and heading towards punk pop and the more mainstream Linkin Park side of Nu metal, Deftones delivered something that was heavy as hell, all while sugar coated with melody. Although it’s still very strange to me that they were signed to Madonna’s record label at the time. 

I’m always a bit disappointed that I never really got on with anything else they did, (it took me 10 years after its release to realise that White Pony was a good album) but even if my Deftones love is just this album, it’s enough.  

https://lynkify.in/song/be-quiet-and-drive-far-away/6P4DcdVD