So their new album has been delayed (again!) but in the meantime we have this double disc retrospective sort of compilation to celebrate their tenth anniversary as a band. The first disc is an audio CD, which features mostly covers, and some of them are pretty weird; The Smith's Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want and The Cure's If Only Tonight We Could Sleep make sense for the Deftones to perform and are damn good songs. A little more surprising but also good are covers of songs by Helmet and Lynyrd Skynyrd. Less pleasing to my ears are covers of Duran Duran and Sade's No Ordinary Love, but points for trying something different.
Randomly enough, there's also a cover of Idiot Pilot's cover of the Deftones' Teenager, ooh, self-referential! It's basically the same as the original except with more analog instruments and prettier singing, but still very good. There are some other different versions of Deftones songs here too, namely acoustic versions of Change, Digital Bath and Be Quiet and Drive, which all suit the mellower format very well, (despite what their guitarist says.*)
The remaining new songs are Crenshaw Punch, an Around the Fur era thrasher, and Black Moon, basically a rap song, featuring B Real from Cypress Hill. They're both OK, but not great.
The second disc is a DVD featuring all of their music videos. The Deftones have a fondness for plain live footage, or even worse, 'band playing the song in a crazy place' videos, but their live stuff does make for a decent video, and the only really bad example of the 'crazy place' video is My Own Summer, where they're playing on cages in shark infested water. But there are a few classics here too, namely Change, which perfectly matches the song's dark mood and Chino's opaque lyrics with an equally dark video and equally opaque imagery, and Bloody Cape, which is a rather bewildering take on a music video standard - the clip all about a hot chick in a short skirt. In between each video are little snippets of live footage, interviews and behind the scenes stuff, which are both interesting and entertaining. There are also live videos for Root and Engine Number 9.
I normally don't talk about the packaging of an album because it makes me feel like too much of a geek, but I will say that this one is particularly nice. It comes with a little booklet featuring lots of pictures and comments about each song on the CD written by the band. It even smells nice!
Overall it's a very nicely put together package. Maybe not worth it just for the b-sides disc, but it definitely is when you factor in the DVD.
*"There's nothing worse than taking some song you wrote to rock out and having to play it like a pussy"
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