#3 - White Pony

#3
Artist: Deftones
Album: White Pony
Year of Release: 2000
Label: Maverick

I started this list with my first favorite record.  As we near the conclusion, let's talk about my second favorite record.  During the span of 1998 to 2000, I went from knowing nothing about popular music to having a fair idea of what I liked and didn't like.  As I shared in those early posts, Eve 6 indicated the kind of sound I prefer while Third Eye Blind started to hint at my inclination towards nifty songwriting.  But as much as I can specifically map how this period of discovery would lead to a love for this album, I cannot emphasize enough how unprepared I was for White Pony.  Much like how Stone's Ruination would change the way I think about beer, this record neatly divides my music-listening history into pre-Deftones and post-Deftones.  Everything before is fuzzy and foreign and everything after is clear as day.

Deftones gets lumped in with the nu metal genre, which is fine.  They were contemporaries of the most famous bands of the zeitgeist and share enough characteristics to justify the classification (plus nu metal as a whole is unfairly denigrated to some degree).  Still, they do hold a special distinction as a gateway of sorts.  The fine folks from the P.O.D.Kast describe it best:

"Deftones are known to many as the band that crosses over a lot of fans: they're the one nu-metal band that people who hate nu-metal like, and they're the one nu-metal band that can get fervent nu-metal fans to listen to other, better music. "

This sounds cliche and it is cliche but it is also incredibly true.  You can draw a throughline in my music-listening history directly from them to Tool to Isis to....everything else, eventually.  I came to most things on this list long after their release (I was not kidding that I didn't listen to anything until 1998), but White Pony and I both came into concurrent existence at exactly the right time.  I can still remember spinning this over and over on my Discman on the way to Rocky Mountain right after I got it, and it still sounds as fresh as it did then.  I owe a lot to this record and I hope this humble post can pay back some of the debt.

The appeal to nostalgia and formative nature of this album is enough to justify its high rank.  That said, it absolutely stands on its own merits as one of the best and most complete rock records ever made.  This isn't to denigrate the rest of the band's catalogue - they've been consistently good to great over the course of nearly three decades - but White Pony finds the band peaking in every single aspect of their craft.  The addition of Frank Delgado on keyboard and turntable is the key, as his work adds to the atmosphere much like his counterpart on the previous entry.  The haunting sounds supporting tracks like "Digital Bath" and "Change" help to elevate them, and give the whole album a distinct feel that only the self-titled follow-up even approaches.  They also maximize the use what I call the "Deftones chorus," where each iteration adds something new.  The lyrics are appropriately abstract, which helps them to earn their Wikipedia-approved moniker of "the Radiohead of metal."  And the opening and closing tracks ("Feiticeira" and "Pink Maggit") experiment with structure in effortlessly successful ways.  Tonight, much like every night, I feel like more.