Links, small notes, or scrollboxes can go here.
This page contains my full album reviews.
I think I’ll preface this second review with some observations relating to my ability to listen and understand a track. I can definitely feel that I’m still very far from being able to grasp a lot in a single listen, or even with a replay. This might be a little worse because of the album is not the easiest to understand? Regardless, my brain still really struggles to take in the lyrics, their meaning, the melody, my feelings, and synthesize it to make it into something coherent. I think another problem came with this review writing thing, there has been moments where I was wondering how much I would rate the album, what I should/would write on such part fo the song, and I feel like because of all this, my attention gets grabbed by something superficial instead of simply trying to make sense and feel the song.
Another problem is obviously that those are lyrics that are , i think, intentionally hard to grasp, and my brain was coded in french, not in english. I have a good level of english, but when it comes to poetry, my factory settings really feel like an obstacle, I have an easier time understanding french poetry, and this shows when I need to decipher lyrics in songs like these.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s just how the albums were built back in 1997, or maybe it’s just an impression, but just like The Lonesome Crowded West, this album feels quite frontloaded. The album doesn’t exactly hit the same after Be Quiet and Drive, just like the other didn’t hit the same after Trailer Trash. It has that feeling of a massive buildup that peaks with one of the album’s best song, and kind of *crashes down* after that. Not that I think the song are bad in the latter part, it’s just that they don’t exactly live up to the phenomenal first half.
Let it be clear before I talk about the tracks, I fucking enjoyed the album. It’s right up my alley, there’s no skips, Chino’s voice is otherworldly, and some of the tracks hit me on a person level. I think I’ll dive into the tracks that marked me, and I’ll order them by how much I liked them.
*Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)* This one is to me, incontestably the best track of the album. In fact this song is the reason why I wanted to try and listen to Deftones *better*, so this comes as no surprise that it is my favortie from the album. This is the one song where I was able to disappear, from the first second to the last, I managed to get lost in this ethereal moment of longing and pain. The song is an escape, it leaves, far away, and takes you with it without your consent. It’s a kidnapping.
The track is to me, very clearly about this longing to disappear, give up on everything and everyone in your life, something i've heard so many times in depressed spaces. But this echoes even more specifically with what I feel as a depressed trans person. I am a self loathing person (this is something that we’ll talk about later on for another track), I despise who I am and I long to become someone else. I wish I could just leave almost everything behind me. Become a new person, create a new life, cut away all the strings that hold me back and would remind me of the person i was and currently am. This is a feeling that fucking sucks, and the track literally smothers you with it. When you add to that the fact that the song is just absurdly beautiful musically, it slowly erases you and prevents you from existing for the next few minutes. This song has everything it needed to effortlessly be my favorite, there is no competition despite the brilliance of the album. Funny thing, my brain really likes to hear “Fly away” instead of “Far away”, and I think it’s cute. I wish I could fly far away.
*Mascara*
Relistening to it without being the most passive listener of all time made it jump from being a *nice song* to my second favorite of the album. I don’t really have a deep analysis or cool emotional connection to make with this one, but I still have a few thoughts to throw away.
This track is such a unique experience, I got chills the entire way through and it was completely unrelated to the 1AM cold breeze coming from the window. It’s calm, but in an devastating way, in a Hurt by Johnny Cash way. The track is slow, the guitar melody burns itself in your brain, and Chino is giving the performance of a lifetime on this track. This is the track that made me realize how special of a singer he is. I’m not even talking about the way he writes, just his voice, his tone, this song shows how he really is one of a kind, he is special, kind of like Chester is.
That’s it, not a lot to say about it, the song is just that good. The track is a hydraulic press, and you're right underneath. It slowly crushes you under the emotion, you can try to resist but it wont slow down, and it won't stop until you've been reduced to nothing.
I think this song also made me realize that I’m much more into the slower paced tracks of Deftones. I like all their stuff, but I think they particulary manage to hurt me with this formula.
*Lhabia*
Okay. I have things to say about this one. Despite being only my third favortie, I think it was the most interesting track to me, at least lyrically with *Rickets*. It originally left me a little confused. I liked it, the way some of the lyrics and muffled, slurred, and barely understandable is absolutely peak and I fuck with that heavily. But I couldn’t exactly make what the song was about. After my first listen I had two interpretations, the first one was that the song was about a toxic relationship, and the other one was that the song was about self-harm. After some google researching and lyrics rereading, it turns out the most widely accepted interpretation is that its about drug abuse -*and yeah, in hindsight it was obvious*- but I want to explain *why* I thought of those interpretations, I think it’s interesting and leads to some nice self-reflection (I also think my second interpretation is quite valid).
The first interpretation was pretty surface level, the song is rather negative, Chino mentions a “she”, so my brain jumped to the conclusion that its about a toxic relationship. The album deals with sex and women a lot, so it makes sense right? Meh. I don’t think it’s that relevant nor interesting.
The second one is that it’s about self-harm. I connected with the lyrics in ways I rarely do, because some of the lines echo completely with my experience of self-harming. There's this very evident addiction aspect in the track, which I definitely got and completely applies to self-harm in general, but some specific lyrics particularly struck me;
The blood allusions immediately brought up the images of scarification to me, it is not the way I personally self-harm, but those are images that have always been in the background of my brain when I’m not going through the best of times. I just happen to have opted for less visible ways of hurting myself.
*"I wanna burn you, wanna watch you”*
This echoes immensely with the way I often self-harm. It often is a form of punishment towards myself (here I would be addressing to myself with the "you" of the song), I feel bad about something in particular, and because of it I want to see myself suffer. The person I see in the mirror disgusts me, I despise them, and for that I want to see them suffer, they must be punished for the way they make me feel. There’s this weird dissociation between me and myself, and both of them hate each others.
*"Dying of boredom”*
This is about addiction, the boredom of not being able to indulge into whatever you crave creates this abominable feeling of extreme boredom, but because of the interpretation I made of the track, this one felt to me like it was a metaphor for depression. I want to self harm to break away from this constant state of numbness and despair.
*"Let's quit, look at what it's doing to you That's okay, 'cause look how it feels Feels great, but look at what it's doing to you That's okay, but look how it feels Fuck, feels great, but look at what it's doing to you But that's okay, 'cause look at how it feels"*
Now this is the part that convinced me the track is about selfharm; this destructive behaviour is how self-harm feels to me. I know it's wrong, I shouldn't indulge in it, but I'm drawn to it and I will, it is both a punishment and a cathartic experience, I will inflict myself pain as a punishment for my feelings, the way I think, the way i've acted, the way I am, but at the same time it might be rewarding. It sometimes isn't, but it's a gamble I'm willing to take because when it does feel good, "*look at how it feels*".
Honestly, after writing all this, I’m realising that it’s somewhat silly to make a clear distinction between substance abuse and self-harm, substance abuse *is* self-harm. My interpretation just happened to portray a different, more physicial and visual, subset of self-harming. Bodily harm and substance abuse are just two sides of the same D20 of self-harm.
*Rickets*
Rickets is the *other* song I really identify with. More than *Be Quiet and Drive* in fact.
I'm a very self loathing person (told you we’d come back to it), as it's probably clear already, I do not like myself, and I have the tendency to hold myself responsible for it, *a lot*. So evidently, I identify with the lyrics, but unlike Lhabia, I don't need to get my grey matter to work much for this one, it's a mirror and theres no blurry spots, this is me.
What I find interesting with this one is actually the feeling it evoked in me, it started with compassion, "I feel like you, I'm the same", a natural response. But the feeling quickly left to let another in, and I can't quite get my finger on it, but the track became much much harder to listen suddenly, to the point where i considered skipping through.
It's this realization of going from "This is me!" to "Oh. This *is* me." This is what it feels to hear me talk about myself. This is what I sound like. This is pathetic. I've often heard other people be unjust towards themselves, and it sucks don't get me wrong, but I'm not sure anything ever made me feel more disgusted by my self-loathing tendencies than this song. This was rough, and I need to shut the fuck up more. Ironically this makes me hate myself even more, I really must be unsufferable, I REALLY need to shut the fuck up more.
This is an incredibly powerful song, I hated listening to it but I love it.
I think *My Own Summer* and *Around the Fur* are kind of a tie right after this one, they're both amazing, and I'm surprised the track eponymous to the album is not more popular. I don’t really have anything to say, they’re super listenable, fantastic tracks.
I’ve been debating a little bit about whether I should give it 4.5 or 5, and my reasoning was the following: the album was less enjoyable after *Be Quiet and Drive*, the songs aren’t skips and are still great, but they don’t exactly live up to the first few tracks. But is it really fair to hold these tracks to such a standard? Should I really be downplaying those songs because they weren’t as personally soulcrushing as *Lhabia, Be Quiet and Drive, Rickets* were, not as beautiful as *Mascara*, but like, the bar is in the fucking stratosphere. I don’t think it’s fair to penalize the album because it didn’t have *five* once-in-a-lifetime tracks, when it already gave me four. The fact that I didn’t *want to* skip anything (except Rickets, but that’s a very special case) also comforts me on this album being a perfect album, it’s a 5/5 and I don’t think its negociable. The bar is unrealistacally high for White Pony, but so was it for Around the Fur, and it surpassed my expectations. This althogether made me realise what a *good* album really is.
I think the question now is moreso if this album will grow even more on me, will it be able to dethrone albums like Discovery or Random Access Memory from the Daft Punks? Only time will tell.
16/06/2025 - Tomorrow is the appointment, I'm anxious. Wish I could *Fly, Far Away*
Feels like the blueprint for modern midwest emo music, plenty of times where I was like “yeag thats definitely something that id hear in a car seat headrest or american football song”, and ngl those were often my favorite parts of the songn but like I went to listen to this album for this specific reason so it tracks lol.
Some obstacles to really understand the album; the accent and the speech of the singer made it kinda hard to follow without lyrics but i still ditched them to not hyperfocus on it and ignore the musicality of it. Also I didnt grow up in the 1990s in a midwestern urban sprawl hellhole.
Not a hot take to say that the album is deeply anti-consumerism and anti-capitalism, thats midwest emo after all, but like was it already like that before this album, or did it create a sort of trend? I don’t know im not musically literate enough to know :3. I think its interesting how its not a *critique* in the way that its not actively screaming against the problems, the causes, the ways to fix it. It doesn’t really point any finger, doesn’t declare anything responsible like RATM would for example, i feel like the vibe and the goal is moreso a big scream of frustration at a situation, it kinda paints a landscape and throws all the emotions at you in relation to that landscape?
It reminded me of Sprawl II (Moutains behind Moutains) from Arcadia Fire, the subject is essentially the same, screams of frustration and resignation in the middle of empty suburbans parking lots. The only difference is in the genres imo, when you listen to *The Lonesome Crowded West* you have this feeling of raw despair, it feels fucking real, the parking is enpty sad and miserable, while Sprawl II brings some more melancholy? Nostalgia? to the mix with its danceability and pop vibe. I picture the parking lot to atleast have buzzing neon signs there and its somewhat a little comforting i guess.
This did bring me to some extra thinking, and a question to which I don’t really have an answer to because of my lack of musical culture. Is this hate or the urban sprawl going to disappear with time or will it just shift? The struggles of living in the american suburbia isn’t the same one as it once was, especially with the arrival of new technologies. newer generations aren’t roaming like ghosts anymore in haunted empty malls like it’s 1990, we’re bedrotting because everything outside still sucks and is too expensive for us, but we have phones and computers that have a complete mental chokehold on us. I wonder if theres already a trend of this being expressed in music? I don’t listen enough to really modern artists but I should.
Trailer Trash is the obvious best track to me, the only one I knew before the album, but it still hits you like a precision rifle shot to the spleen. what a fucking hit
Teeth like God’s Shoeshine is crazy good. Got turned off by the first 45 seconds that I didn’t exactly like, but fuck does it take off. And by the 3rd “part”, you can really feel the modern midwest-emo in there for the first time. Like this is the shit id hear listening to 2010s bands.
Doin’ the cockroach is one of the best start to a song to me, the song in general is amazing imo, just don’t really like the “Doin’ the cockroach” chorus, but I feel like that might have been the point? unsure, but please, i get it you’re doing the cockroach now lets move on.
Bankrupt on Selling and Lounge (closing time) are the other standout songs to me, even replayed Lounge during the first album listen, which I only did for Trailer Trash because it’s that good. They’re great, listenable af without being locked in too.
I feel like the second half of the album dorsn’t exactly live up to the first (kinda hard when it’s that good I guess), but I think it might be somewhat voluntary. On one hand it happens right after Trailer Trash, and its pretty hard to live to that (I’m not sure theres a song in their discograghy that would in my eyes), so you inevitably start to lose a little bit of the crazy momentum you built with the first few tracks. Now I have a feeling that it is not exactly a coincidence and that the setlist was maybe built that way. It might have been because I was running out of energy or something, but it felt like the album was losing me a little bit? My personal theory is that the songs are just different, mauybe a little deeper, a little more abstract that the first half, and thats why and started losing my grasp on the project a little bit, right until Bankrupt on Selling
To me, its a strong 3.5, so I’ll put it at a 4/5, I THINK i understand why its like a cult classic, but some aspects are definitely lost on me because of the cultural baggage that’s deep into the album and that is somewhat alien to me. I’m a french Gen-z kid, not a 1990s midwest kid, and combined with the accent and speech, it makes it for a hard listen at times. Regardless, the music is right up my alley, and so are the messages and the vibes I could get out of it, definitely an enjoyable experience that I should repeat another time, maybe with the entire lyrics under the eyes this time. Also might be a better experience if I’m not in the train in the middle of the afternoon, it fits more a late summer night of loneliness where I stare at my ceiling.
I think it’s a nice way to start this album analysis thing, i’m not sure i’ll get into every album as deep as I did for this one (although its not actually all that deep, its just vibes & feelings lol), but its a fun exercise :3
15/06/2025 - Can’t wait for my first HRT appointment, please let me get my medication in the week.
Optional notes, links, or quick references.