Deftones and Gojira decimated Dallas, TX on a very humid night that has been two years in the making on a co-headlining tour.
The night started off with the Los Angeles based Australian duo V O W W S, who are self described as death pop. The band fits the bill well as something quite different than the heaviness later on in the night. They sound a lot like if you mixed the synthiness from John Carpenter movies, Depeche Mode, and Crystal Castles and you’d have this band. The set they played was 30 minutes and they played a lot of songs from the 2015 album The Great Sun. It was very interesting to see how Rizz used certain effects to modulate her voice and also play the synth at the same time.
Gojira had an all white scrim up that had some sigils on it to keep the band hidden until the actual music started. They started with “Born For One Thing” from 2021’s album Fortitude. The band sounded incredibly massive and heavy as one would expect from the French metal band. The band played a great medley of songs with no time in between them, just one right after another. The band also had air canons on the edge of the stage that shot off during the set to add to it, mostly when a breakdown was happening or a deep scream. The band had very vibrant red and yellow stage lights that changed rapidly with the music along with the video that interacted and extended the conceptualism of most of Gojira’s work. The band played such favorites as “L’Enfant Sauvage,” “Amazonia,” “The Cell,” “Flying Whales,” a medley of “Love and Remembrance” and many more. Deftones are possibly one of the forefathers of the nu-metal movement of the mid to late 90’s and they are still going just as hard as ever. The band took to the stage at 9:20 pm with a very, very heavy bass sound from a set of speakers at the front of the stage that also acts as a platform for Chino Moreno to get on and get closer to the crowd. The air was filled with smoke from the stage and made it hard to see what was going on at first. But the band started off playing the synth heavy intro to “Genesis” to show that they meant business and were there to put on the show fans have been waiting two years for. “Rocket Skates” was the second song and it really showcased how the two and a half years off have been so good to Chino’s voice as his screams were the best they have been in years as he exclaimed, “Guns. Razors. Knives. F**k with me.” It was literally chill-inducing how amazing it sounded.This date was originally scheduled for September of 2020 then to September of 2021 to May of 2022. Deftones played a 19-song set with all of the hits that everyone has come to know and love and a few that were deeper tracks. There were singalongs galore with some of the older songs such as “Change (In The House Of Flies).” Deftones also had a few new faces on this tour, a new bass player Fred Sablan who used to be Marilyn Manson’s bassist as well as a second guitarist, both of who are just touring members since some songs have very complex layered guitar parts. Deftones rocketed through a hour and thirty minute set and touched on every record in the large discography of theirs but was surprisingly very heavy on the Diamond Eyes album, playing four songs off of it.
The stage setup that Deftones had was very pretty with lots going; it was lots of cotton candy colored looking lights with screens that had videos projected onto them that fit the music. During the slow song “Sextape,” lead singer Chino Moreno took center stage and played guitar with a very heavy pink backlight illuminating him as images of waves crashing on a black sand beach were shown on the screens behind them.
The band concluded the main set playing the title track from the most recent album Ohms. They came back and played two of the oldest and heaviest songs they have, “Lotion” which is from arguably the breakout 1997 album Around The Fur and then it went into “Engine no. 9” from the band’s first album Adrenaline. All in all the fans got what they have been waiting two years for, an amazing Deftones concert that pulled out all the stops.
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