Dat Haiku Tho: Faith No More - Surprise! You're Dead!

0:38 mark.

I would bet money
A hardcore band stole this riff
Mike Patton is mad

A Perfect Circle - The Package

Riff mark: 4:54 

I can tell you how many times I’ve attempted to listen to Mer De Noms but can’t tell you how many times I’ve rotated this perfect circle. Maynard and a cluster of guys from other bands who don’t seem to mind him return after three years of head-tapping to seemingly make the most tortured, seductive, and downright fucking beautiful mainstream hard rock album to slip and crawl through airwave cracks like the banana millipede wriggling along its front cover. Just a bit of rearranging and contemplating, APC managing to shut up and dig in the dirt for resource, uprooting every emotion, and waxing them like rosin to everything unplugged. Maynard, sober, nailed to the earthly perch, un-stoned and not flying like some spaced-out Alex Grey third eye, is left relying on his gift of voice in full essence, a steady talent, pushing forward with gusto on brooding, Deftones-assimilating The Package, a 7+ minute opener that spans every dynamic and volume; a great song. Very few tracks understandably reach its forte yet by deliberate choice; most prefer to shake away leaves and hair from hushed, acoustic nudity (Blue) or echo away into the shadows of bushes (Vanishing). Some decrescendos are as obvious as name (Lullaby, performed by Jarboe of The Swans). A surprise in 2003, a major label peach not squeezed into a cup of deadline. Worth your time. Begrudging gripe: it’s too over-the-top depressing. The Disney rendition of that Failure cover makes a listen of Fantastic Planet feel like a sunshine ray. Weak and Powerless was the only radio hit, though somewhere The Outsider made waves, despite better songs existing here.

Deftones - Pink Maggit

2:43 mark

Having more in common with perhaps The Cure's Disintegration than most general nu-metal albums at that time, White Pony was an album you opted not to pursue, but rather, through word of radio or compact disc, had its majesty bestowed upon you by chance through a friend in a car with a drink and a smoke. Never has an album been more representative of a generational epoch without representing much of anything, Chino's lyrics so cryptic at this point that as a collective they signify the essence of obscurity. But the music, that sweet, spring-to-summer haze, the trails of gasoline-fueled road-trips, a girl's perfume and nicotine stuck to your clothes the next afternoon, that music was our hedon wine god holding a ticking clock. White Pony is at all times sexually urgent, yet confidently strides through eleven songs in a linear, story-book rendition much like the aforementioned Disintegration (Cure and Deftones are fans of each other). The obvious hit from the get-go was Change  In The House of Flies, with Knife Party trailing behind, but I'll be damned if I ever skip a track. Feiticeira is a perfect opener like a reel being fed through an analog machine, Digital Bath a slow bubble never exactly bursting, Elite being that burst, and then Rx Queen, with its opening beat I drum on tables fifteen years later. Teenager has everything to do with a first kiss from a girl you'll never see again, Knife Party building unfinished ideas from Around the Fur by slicing emotion in two, closing with Change and Pink Maggit, over twelve minutes of the most unraveled depth of a generation eager, beaten, sullied. Deftones wore this album as a disclaimer that it was more than radio and a spiky look. This album was the myriad of every frustration to accompany the time between which high school ended and the legal age to drink, which we never followed, began. In a morbid, yet devoted pact, we picked songs to be played at our funerals when we were only 19. One of my five favorite albums of all time from any genre, a testament to the ability of this quintet to craft one transcripted moment of time, and not just become its soundtrack. Beware special 12-track editions with Back To School, an abbreviated, dumb reinvention of Pink Maggit, as the opening track, completely diluting the impact of both the original opening and closing moments.