Deftones - Saturday Night Wrist
On October 31, 2006, "Saturday Night Wrist", the fifth studio album by "Deftones", was released.
Some albums sound like the studio where they were born, and some sound like its opposite. This one belongs to the first kind, and yet it is disturbingly beautiful. Two years of arguments, producers who were replaced, a singer who vanished into a side project, and vocals that were erased entirely and recorded again gave birth to one of the darkest, most ethereal and most uncompromising albums in the catalog of the Sacramento five-piece.
To understand how we got there, we need to go back to 2004. The previous album, the self-titled one released in 2003, met with mixed reactions and a degree of confusion, and the record label Maverick reminded the band that it owed the label another album. The five-piece gathered at The Spot studio in Sacramento, moved in the summer to the Morning View house in Malibu, and came out with enough material for a full album. Chino Moreno later described it as pure evil music.
Then came the search for a producer. Names on the table included Ken Andrews of "Failure" and Ric Ocasek of "The Cars", and after that the band worked for about a week with Dan the Automator, an experiment that, according to guitarist Stephen Carpenter, pulled it toward the more technical, "mathematical" side of the sound. In the end Chino and drummer Abe Cunningham managed to convince the others to turn to Bob Ezrin, the man behind the album "The Wall" by "Pink Floyd", behind Alice Cooper and behind the album "Destroyer" by "Kiss". Engineer Brian Virtue came along with him.
Before getting to work, the band went on a short month-long tour with Dredg and C-Minus to test the material in front of an audience, and finished it in Hartford, Connecticut, not far from Ezrin's studio. Recording began in November 2004, and keyboardist Frank Delgado said in an interview that the band stayed there for a few months in the producer's home studio. Very quickly it became clear that the chemistry wasn't working. The tension between Chino and the producer kept growing, and at some point he simply left to keep working on his side project, "Team Sleep", while the rest carried on without him. The sessions with Ezrin ended before Christmas, and the band went back to Sacramento for a break.
2005 was a year of dangerous silence. Chino went on tour with "Team Sleep", who finally released their long-awaited debut album, and looking back he said he couldn't focus on the recordings because of addictions to drugs and alcohol and the breakup of his long marriage. Meanwhile, the band released the compilation "B-Sides & Rarities" in early October to mark a decade of career, including a cover of the song "Wax and Wane" by "Cocteau Twins" that was recorded with Virtue. Toward the end of the year Chino met with Terry Date, the producer of the four previous albums, to record vocals for the remaining songs, and the band managed to record a cover of the song "Jealous Guy" by John Lennon for Amnesty, and a cover of the song "Drive" by "The Cars" that was released exclusively on the iTunes Store.
At the start of 2006 a dramatic decision was made. All the vocal parts recorded until then were erased, and work started over with an old friend, Shaun Lopez of the bands "Far" and "The Revolution Smile", who stepped in as vocal producer. Recording ended in April, and the mix was done by Ryan Williams. According to reports from the period, Ezrin recorded the instruments, Lopez handled the vocals, and everything was spread across five different studios. In an interview during the tour, Chino said that at some point he thought this might be their last album, and his bandmates assumed he simply wanted to leave.
The title "Saturday Night Wrist" refers to the nerve damage caused when a drunk person falls asleep on his own arm, and according to Chino it also describes what happens when you're alone on a Saturday night and your best friend is your own shaking wrist. It's a black joke, and nobody is really laughing.
The album is opened by its first single, the song "Hole in the Earth", whose video, directed by Brian Lazzaro, was shot in New York. Chino explained that the song describes the communication problems that tore the band apart during the recordings, and you don't need to know that to feel it. A rolling riff, an empty space between the drumming and the guitars and a chorus about a hole in the ground that the narrator decides to climb out of all sound like a room where nobody talks anymore.
Next comes the song "Rapture", on which Carpenter wrote and recorded all the guitars, and according to Chino it expresses the confusion he felt while working on the album. Carpenter also stands alone behind "Rats!Rats!Rats!", which Chino himself defines as entirely Carpenter's creation. Anyone who wants to understand why the band still belongs to metal, despite all the beauty that comes afterward, is invited to start here.
The song "Beware" runs six minutes and serves, according to Chino, as a warning to others about the three things that troubled him most during the recordings: sex, drugs and alcohol. Right after it comes the song "Cherry Waves", which deals with testing the trust one person places in another, and which, in the opinion of PopMatters magazine, is the moment the band dives deep into shoegaze.
On the song "Mein" the guest is Serj Tankian, the singer of "System Of A Down", who is also credited as one of the songwriters alongside the band and Lopez. The song was recorded among the last ones for the album and released as the second single in March 2007.
The strangest move on the album, and one of its most beautiful, is the instrumental piece "U,U,D,D,L,R,L,R,A,B,Select,Start", named after the famous Konami cheat code from video games. Carpenter plays drums on it, Chino plays guitar, and in 2016 Consequence of Sound magazine ranked it number 15 on its list of the twenty best "Deftones" songs, describing a jazzy piece that stretches and contracts like nothing else the band has done.
On the song "Pink Cellphone" singer Annie Hardy of the band "Giant Drag" takes part, and according to Carpenter, without Hardy's vocals the song is entirely Chino's. The song "Kimdracula" took its name from part of Chino's email address at the start of the recordings, a period of heavy drug use. And the song "Rivière", which closes the album, was born from a story about a witch written while he was high, and it is also one of the strongest uses of dynamics in the band's catalog.
The graphics were overseen by Frank Maddocks, and images from the film "Roxanna" are woven into the artwork. The album leaked online on October 13, about two weeks before its release, and eventually reached number ten on the Billboard 200 chart and gold status in the United States and Britain. Critics were split between enthusiasm, like Alternative "Press magazine", which gave it a perfect score, and reservations, like "Rolling Stone magazine", which compared its layers of spacey sound to "Radiohead" but wrote that the songwriting doesn't always come together.
In Chino's own eyes, success changed nothing. To this day he ranks the album as his least favorite among all "Deftones" albums, and in a 2016 interview with "Kerrang magazine" he said that the tensions of the recording period and the death of Chi Cheng have kept him from listening to it since its release. Bassist Cheng signed off here on his last album with the band. In November 2008 he was injured in a severe car accident that left him in a coma, and he passed away in 2013.
On the tour that followed the album the band reconciled and began working on the next album, "Eros", but after the accident it was shelved, and in its place the band returned in 2010 with the album "Diamond Eyes", born out of a desire for positivity. If "White Pony" was the moment "Deftones" discovered how to turn beauty and violence into one thing, then the album "Saturday Night Wrist" is the moment they paid the price for it. The empowering anger of the past gave way to sadness, and the result is not the band's most accessible album, nor the favorite of the one who recorded it, but it is probably the most honest. Twenty years later, it's clear that this darkened room remains one of the most beautiful places the band has ever led us to.
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