Credit: John Reeves

Camden Electric Ballroom
Thursday 12 October 2006

In one respect, the Deftones are a victim of their own success. Far too popular to normally play anything even remotely approach intimate, their jagged brand of skate-metal is often tempered by echoing acoustics when it really demands to be rubbed against an audience at close quarters. Which makes tonight’s show that little bit more special, being the smallest UK show they’ve done since a last minute filler gig at the Forum they sold out in 2 days after a Limp Bizkit support slot collapsed.

It’s testament to the Sacramento five-piece’s fluency in sound that while nu-metal’s big guns have stuttered and fallen, the Deftones have walked through the wreckage of a thousand unused turntables shrouded in the forgotten baggy jeans of yesteryear to actually come out stronger.  When Chino Moreno bounds up on to the barrier as his band launch into Knife Party, it’s a messianic gesture of rebirth, not of rock star arrogance.

This feeling of surviving a shitstorm is as thick within the crowd itself – the £22 ticket price has seen to it that the crowd are those who grew up using Around The Fur as their teenage soundtrack, and aren’t ready to give up  their formulative band to a new generation just yet.

After lighting the moshpit’s touchpaper with My Own Summer, Moreno redeems his somewhat lacklustre performances over the summer by measuring up against Maynard James Keenan as he fills all the parts in their collaboration on “Passenger”. Tonight it’s very much a case of ‘take no prisoners’. Even with new album, “Saturday Night Wrist” a mere two weeks away, the band sensibly shy away from confounding the audience with a raft of songs they barely know, and instead surge through a set heavily made up of their first three records, barely touching on 2003’s fourth and eponymous release.

Whether it’s the visceral assault of the Adrenaline era, the confident balance of “Around The Fur”, or the more thoughtful melody’s of “White Pony”, tonight there’s not a single moment that the band don’t look like the commanders of a giant army of fervent dervishes. This band inspires something beyond devotion in the fans; it’s approaching belief.