DEFTONES
“Saturday Night Wrist”
(Maverick)
Deftones’ angst keeps getting more cosmic. Destruction has always fascinated this band: the self-destruction of addicts, the way love breaks down, the inevitability of death and decay. On their fifth studio album, “Saturday Night Wrist,” they continue to veer from suicidal despair to fury, from deliberate melody to thrashing and screaming. Now they occasionally look beyond self-obsession, thinking about war in “Combat,” religion in “Pink Cellphone,” the entire earth rotting away in “Kimdracula” and, as intoned in “Mein” by their collaborator Serj Tankian (from System of a Down), “the universe breaking us down.”
Formed in Sacramento in 1988, Deftones have worked their way through rap-rock and grunge, and they have flaunted the influence of Tool and Nine Inch Nails. “Saturday Night Wrist” grows more expansive. After a long apprenticeship, Deftones have started to sound like their own band: one that seesaws between agonized crooning and hard-rock attack, within songs as well as through albums.
“Saturday Night Wrist” was produced by the band and Bob Ezrin, who drew outsize, theatrical hard rock from Alice Cooper, Kiss and Pink Floyd in the 1970s. He makes Deftones’ music more spacious than before, even when the band is hammering away at top speed. Perhaps it was Mr. Ezrin who also convinced the band that it didn’t have to deface its prettier moments immediately.
The song “Hole in the Earth,” which could be about the singer imagining his own grave, almost waltzes at times. “Beware” brings Deftones close to Pink Floyd territory in a slow ballad that first crests in a gorgeous harmony chorus, then goes on to explode from within. “Beware the water,” Chino Moreno sings. “You knew that it was never safe.” Sometimes crickets chirp along on the beat.
Even amid the high-speed songs, “Rats! Rats! Rats!” starts out like a hardcore rant — “Decide is this it? Is it? Decide!” — but suddenly swoops into an arching chorus of second thoughts. It’s not some blatant concession to pop. It’s Deftones keeping everyone off balance, including themselves. JON PARELES
WILLIE NELSON
“Songbird”
(Lost Highway)
In the enviable position of having nothing to lose, Willie Nelson has knocked around prodigiously during the last 15 years of record making: a kids’ album, a jazz album, a reggae album, lots of collaborations and homages. Producers with vastly different styles have benignly captured him for a few days, and he has sailed through each experience intact, unchanged, fully inhabiting himself, if not fully inhabiting the emotional truth of each song.
Ryan Adams, who has more ideas for songs and records than he can use for himself, was the captor for Mr. Nelson’s newest album. He produced “Songbird,” using his own country-rock band, the Cardinals, abetted by Mr. Nelson’s harmonica player, Mickey Raphael; he wrote one of the songs too. “Songbird” is a studiously distressed honky-tonk record, with a lot of echo, feedback, splintered edges, unstable tempos and steel-guitar solos boosted up in the mix: in short, a very good recent Ryan Adams record, except for the absence of Mr. Adams’s voice.
This album includes songs outside anything resembling Mr. Nelson’s normal repertory: those by Leonard Cohen (“Hallelujah”), Gram Parsons (“$1,000 Wedding”), the Grateful Dead (“Stella Blue”) and Fleetwood Mac (“Songbird”). None give you that dizzy feeling that comes when a new voice inhabits the precise dimensions of a song you know well. Mr. Adams has worked hard to give each song its own special, shambling environment, and in some places — particularly the Parsons song — he designs crescendos with vicious emotional swells that make you forget how stylized the songs are. But more to the point Mr. Nelson’s voice is an instant rearranger: he can even break up Mr. Cohen’s granite delivery into mysterious microclimates of rhythm. BEN RATLIFF
BEN RILEY’S MONK LEGACY SEPTET
“Memories of T”
(Concord)
The drummer Ben Riley has as valid a claim as anyone on the music of Thelonious Monk. Mr. Riley worked with Monk in the mid-to-late 1960s, a stretch when that stubbornly brilliant pianist and composer was enjoying the cachet of a spot on the cover of Time magazine. Monk’s band of that period was the steadiest of his career; it was also one of his best, partly because of Mr. Riley’s coolly effervescent swing.
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