White Pony is that kind of effort. The Deftones have always skirted the arty edge of hard music. They've long been threatening to stray from the head-and-booty-banging pimp-rock style they helped to invent. But few could have expected such committed experimentation from a band that has everything to gain from keeping things obvious.

Even more surprising, White Pony ends up being more accessible than the group's two previous albums, because it's not a half-formed mess but a classic alternative-rock album, as gentle and catchy as it is dark. The urge to match the Pumpkins or Nine Inch Nails for palatability is also the album's most serious artistic flaw -- its glassy production trades nuance for studio-generated crescendos. The monster mash of Chi Cheng's bass and Stephen Carpenter's guitar loses impact, not because the songs are too mild, but because the polish is too thick.

Scrape off the veneer, though, and many interesting kinks emerge. Chino Moreno starts out singing on his knees and explores positions from there. In "Feiticeira," named after a Brazilian temptress-cum-game-show host, he's a kidnap victim who can't even hang on to his own point of view -- by the end of the song, he's roaring the words of his female assailant. In "Passenger," a duet with Maynard James Keenan of Tool, the merged male voices represent another abductee, this time a clearly willing victim. "Knife Prty," a tantalizing (and, incidentally, nonsexist) meditation on erotic blood sport, merges beats, riffs and Moreno's breathy vocals in a swoon of multidirectional lust.

Beats, as in hip-hop, matter on White Pony. The Deftones' newest member, DJ Frank Delgado, arranges sounds as ingenious color rather than as foundation on songs like the apocalyptic "RX Queen," to which he adds feral percussion. Delgado and drummer Abe Cunningham link organically, making this rock-rap union more than a pose.

White Pony is Moreno's vision, though, and he keeps it complex. His voice fluctuating between tenderness and hammer-heavy rage, he enacts the disorientation that desire creates. This tough guy knows that when love's arrow wounds him, his body gives. His willingness to stay with the pain is the source of his greatest insight.

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ANN POWERS

(Posted: Jul 6, 2000)