This week’s BBC’s Radio 1 Rock Show with Daniel P Carter was a Deftones special, playing Ohms in full plus interviews with Chino, Frank, Abe and Sergio. The band commented on several tracks from Deftones’ new album “Ohms“. Most interesting is that “Ohms” has a snapping guest; Abe and Sergio told BBC that Zach Hill (Team Sleep’s drummer) plus a bunch of friends are snapping at the end of “The Spell of Mathematics”. Chino adds up that “Genesis” was really different in the beggining with soft vocals and “Ohms” was a slow guitar song when Stef first sent him a demo. Here’s a transcript of what the band had to say about the new songs:
GENESIS
Frank: I really like Genesis, man. I think that was one of the first songs where we were out the gate when we were done writing it, we would play it everyday when we were writing. Come in and write more stuff and we would just jam that one. I think we knew that was the opener.
Chino: There was a whole other other song to that, I wrote lyrics and sang a whole different song to that. The same exact recording, the same song, but it was a whole different approach as a whole. It was my initial idea and it wasn’t an attack kind of vocal, was very much I read through the music whatever, it wasn’t bad, but because we did it all in chunks or some at home, especially my vocals. So I came home and it was over the holiday, over towards the end of the year and I was listening to all the roughs of my vocals and stuff and some of the finals of my vocals and I said; man, I just want to approach this differently like this song deserves like something just more intense you know. I started it all over again from scratch and so glad I did because I love where it is now to wear what it was. You know. I mean it’s like night and day.
CEREMONY
Chino: This is one of the first songs that we wrote, but a lot of this stuff kind of comes from jamming, so Ceremony was one of those ones where it was just like you know someone just playing something and then everybody just kind of like picks up their instrument just like oh starts reacting to each other and then it starts to build. But yeah, I feel like I really connect with sound lyrically, that song is pretty dark. Yeah, I kind of like tether with the true meaning of that song, ’cause it’s really really really bad. It’s not good. Yeah, I don’t know. That’s a hard one to talk about, but as far as the music and make the whole by the whole song to me is, I think it’s a special one for, you know on this record for sure.
URANTIA
Chino: The song itself is kind of…It was a trip because it’s probably like one of the most, specially the way it starts out musically, it’s like almost like reminiscent of thrash metal. The “Jiggin, jang, jang, jang”…. I mean, that’s like Death Angel or like straight up Bay Area like Crash, from where we were growing up. When Stef was playing out he came up with that was right away. I was just like yes, this is so like something that we all love but we’ve never really done. You know. And then the song kind of drops into like this swoony kind of versus whatever and… but the lyrics are pretty interesting to me because I really, really kind of painting a picture of like of a scenario in like… I live like around a Lake or like this Big Lake. I ride my bike around, like you know, couple times a week. I walk around it. It’s like a seven mile kind of loop, but I like about circling around the Lake and just like you know this is all like literal kind of things that I was seeing about, you know, I mean from like digging into the ashtray and pulling up someone cigarette and lighting it and taking a drag like very like descriptive kind of things, whatever. Although it’s all made up, it’s kind of fun. Sometimes we can do that as far as like be very, very descriptive. And don’t do that all the time. Maybe that’s kind of something that I really don’t do that much. I mean it sometimes my lyrics like you said earlier, look too camouflaged, so sometimes to be very descriptive is kind of like kind of out of my comfort zone anyway.
THE SPELL OF MATHEMATICS
Sergio: There’s a part in one of the songs where it breaks down to like a cool drum and bass thing, and then there’s like clapping and snapping. Kind of coming in, you know, and what I really like about that moment was how organic it was because we had this written out the arrangement for the song. We merged two ideas in the studio. We were trying to come up with something in the studio and I had just kind of written out like a test arrangement. So Abe and I played it just to hear it and at the end of the what was the song at the time we kind of went into this jam and then were like that’s really cool. And I think it was like Chino or Stef. I think was like this should be in the song so that take that was meant to be a scratch take, became the actual song.
ABE: We had this thought of having some lot of space in this onto towards the end it’s allowed itself or something a bit different and we ended up having a little snap barbershop quartet snap duet… or actually no it was a quartet. We had some buddies were around. If you know Zach Hill, rad drummer from Hella, Death Grips and other bands and stuff… So we end up taking a little break. Met him for a beer or two, and then he went back in the studio with us and we’re just like let’s see what we can do and we went out and did snaps, Zach’s quite an amazing Mega Drummer, so something as simple as he just doing some snaps on the record were pretty cool. Always good to have friends around as well…
POMPEJI
Chino: One of my favorite parts at the end of Pompeji, the end of it sort of like dying out and then it kind of goes into this kind of synth bed. When we put those Seagulls in there, this song sort of changes setting. I love when you can do that like just add this one little element and it shifts like the whole setting. You may have thought this song was taking place. You know, like whatever setting it is. Kind of neat. You know, I love transitions. You’re making a record these days. You know everything so single driven and you know if you’re going to make a record, that’s a piece of music. And it’s not a conceptual piece to music, but the fact that every songs can sort of transition to one another when things like that happen. It’s like, you know, that takes me back to like obviously some of my favorites records of all time, like Pink Floyd or whatever. Like you go on this journey, those kind of things like always stand out to me. Me and Sergio, specially like we’re always just like we have this thing to achieve that at some point we’re still far just like that. Look at each others eyes on certain parts and we just like we know we like get these points that are just like Floydian. Kind of moments were just like yes.
OHMS
Chino: Stef sent me that demo three years ago you like I love when I opened up my email and like he sent me something that to me that’s one of the biggest highs where I can ever get ’cause he doesn’t do it often. So it means that like he’s hyped about this likely something he wants me to hear. You know it must be special. The tempo that is on the record. It’s like way spread up from way since it was like this real stonery kind of like you know. Just like sludgy kind of like thing, whatever but the riffs work that the ideas were there, but a lot of this stuff kind of comes from jam. You know, maybe a third of the stuff will come from just us being in the room and jam. Those are probably the most Deftones tunes, I think, because obviously did everybody just sort of like reacting to each other.
