This time around, Sergio Vega’s bittersweet position has become more firmly established, and he lends a bigger hand to the band’s songwriting, something made immediately apparent by the cascading bass melodies in ‘Swerve City’. Koi No Yokan is Deftones coming to terms with their own strengths, taking everything that’s gone before, then refining and polishing it to an impossible sheen. This is widescreen alt-rock with an appropriately mammoth production, where euphoric choruses and crushing verses don’t just sit alongside each other but ebb and flow to become inextricable entities – see gargantuan rockers such as ‘Leathers’ and ‘Gauze’, cutting with serrated riffs before soothing with embalming melodies. While Diamond Eyes could occasionally feel like a step back from Saturday Night Wrist – all riffs, and not enough ambience – Koi No Yokan welds the finest elements of the two to create a heady fusion. Frontman Chino Moreno has already raised expectations to vertigo-inducing heights after telling, 'I really feel like we reached a peak on our dynamics on this record.' It’s quite a claim – but there’s not a single track on Koi No Yokan that disproves it. Whereas with Diamond Eyes simply getting the band to produce and release an album was a miracle in itself, now the band’s latest, Koi No Yokan, faces the difficult task of living up to Deftones’ last effort. These were hardly the circumstances for a stone-cold classic, but with former Quicksand bass player Sergio Vega handling the low-end, the Sacramento quintet returned with an album that came close to the consistency of 2000’s era-defining White Pony.
Few would have predicted that Deftones’ 2010 release Diamond Eyes would be quite so monumentally well-received: here was a band who had already shelved a still-yet-unheard album, Eros, been the victim of persistent in-fighting during the sessions for 2006’s Saturday Night Wrist, and whose bassist, founding member Chi Cheng, lay in a car crash-induced coma.
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