Deftones - White Pony (20th Anniversary Deluxe Edition)

Oooh, this is going to be a long one. I've been actively avoiding starting this blog post.

Luckily I've mostly calmed down now and I think I can finally listen to Black Stallion without the rage I had the first time I heard it. In fact, if you skip the terrible, tossed-off, barely 2-minute-long "remix" of Feiticeira, it's not a bad album. Now, that's not the praise it could be - "not bad" is a pretty low bar, especially given the source material here. There's a fair amount to unpack here, and I'm still not sure where to start.

Let's go back to the beginning. When Deftones started talking about the 20th anniversary of White Pony, there was talk of "Black Stallion", a plan they always had to get people to remix the album - not a revolutionary idea, but certainly not one that many metal bands could have pulled off in 2000, and still quite interesting in 2020. When the re-release got announced, I got very excited, even though few of the remixers meant anything to me (five of the eleven were names I knew, or had at least heard of). There were a few options, all very expensive - for £55 you could get the 4LP version, or for double that you could get the 4LP version with the albums on cd too, and a fancy book. It'd just been my birthday, and between my parents and my in-laws I had precisely £110 in birthday money (partly in the form of a Norman Records voucher). Despite knowing that I didn't need to go for the more expensive version, I went for it anyway. Hilariously, I remember thinking "if Black Stallion is awesome, I'll be pleased to have mp3s of it"; little did I know. 

At some point towards the tail end of 2020 Black Stallion was released on streaming services (I know this because my desk was in the sitting room, but it hadn't got so cold that I moved it nearer to the radiator - during a monotonous pandemic, the various locations of my desk are really the only way I can distinguish within the passage of time). I frantically dug out my long-forgotten Spotify password and gave it a listen. My heart sank almost instantly. What the fuck was that remix of Feiticeira? How could DJ Shadow not focus the entire remix of Digital Bath around Chino's "I feel like moooore", instead of letting it drift off into a blur of noises? Even Robert Smith's remix of Teenager was thoroughly underwhelming. The only remix that I didn't hate on first listen was Mike Shinoda's remix of Passenger - I read some comments about the album on the internet afterwards (a dangerous thing to do, and not recommended in general) mostly to see if I wasn't the only one who hated it. One person made the interesting comment that the mixers didn't "respect" the band or the material enough to do a good job, and I see what they mean. Mike Shinoda is the exception to that rule - I suspect he is the only one who looks up to the Deftones (Robert Smith is a fan, but the admiration goes the other way there). Then I read a review where someone said that remix was the low-point of the album. I think I agree with the offended metalhead more than the artsy-reviewer though.

I'm now going to dedicate a whole paragraph to ripping into the remix of Feiticeira, so if you've already had enough of my rage about that particular song, you can probably skip this one. If you've not heard the remix, it starts off with a few lines of the original guitar, before falling away to something that barely resembles anything from the original song. One or two of Chino's lines are somewhere in the background, and the whole finishes before it even really starts. Feiticeira is one of the greatest openings to an album ever, and is a huge song. How Clams Casino thought they could spin it into a half-baked interlude I don't know; how it got onto the album is a bigger mystery. The "respect" comment from before feels particularly apt here - how could anyone who actually enjoys that song, that album and the importance it plays turn in something so half-hearted? It's making me angry all over again. Utter garbage. I'm nearly tempted to buy that over-priced Record Store Day 12" just to have a better remix of Feiticeira (the b-side), and I've not even heard that one. But I can't see how it could be any worse.

But, if you just skip that song (in what world do you "just skip" Feiticeira? Argh!) then there's less to get angry about. Once I realised that was the solution, I have played Black Stallion a few more times. I couldn't say I've enjoyed it - it's not a patch on White Pony - but I've seen some of the appeal. In fact, in places it becomes an album you could play in polite company and people might enjoy (hang on, I'm trying to say the positive is that they've turned one of the greatest albums of all time into generic background music? What have I become?). The exception to that of course being Blanck Mass's remix of Elite, which somehow manages to be even heavier. I almost wish they'd gone the other way - I'd love to hear a non-brutal version of that song. A few of the songs really have few redeeming features - I'd be hard pushed to tell you anything about the remixes of Korea and Change (in the House of Flies) and I'm literally listening to the second one right now. It feels like a fucking relief when Squarepusher doesn't do away with the guitars in Pink Maggit - I'm always desperate to hear a guitar ever since they disappeared in Feiticeira (of course, he punishes us by distorting Chino for no reason other than he had to do something to get his fee I guess).

So those are my thoughts on Black Stallion. I keep thinking back to when it announced and how naïve I was to have high hopes about it, which is ridiculous because it was a year ago, not something that happened in my youth. I should have known I'd hate a remix album, I hate almost all remixes of rock music. With very few exceptions, they're all terrible. I guess that remix album of Explosions in the Sky's All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone was good, but I feel like the remixers were peers, rather than intentionally different. Why did I think this was going to be good? Maybe because the original album was so great, I figured how could anyone make it sound bad. Well, now I know.

I never thought I'd be writing about the 20th anniversary version of White Pony and have had such bad things to say, let alone to have written six paragraphs without talking much about the eleven songs that changed my life back in the year 2000. As written about on here many years ago, I have an original pressing of White Pony on vinyl, so I didn't need to buy this to have a copy of the album I love so much on vinyl. I love that album, I think I always will. It was special, unique and the peak of so many things. I still love Deftones, but I don't think I've loved them more than when this album came out. It felt important and we were lucky enough to be right there at the right time to watch it unfold.

So, original White Pony and dubious-at-best Black Stallion aside, what else is there to say? Well, still more! For one, there's amazingly little here for a 20th anniversary version. For the prices they're charging, you'd want more for sure - would it have killed them to throw in The Boy's Republic from the limited edition cd? They could even have put the Back to School EP on vinyl and that would have been exciting (although I appreciate their animosity to that particular release). Demos, live songs, literally any other material would have been welcome. In all the various versions of this release, you just got the same 22 songs. I can't believe there aren't fascinating curios from the era that fans would have lapped up (and all of them would have been better than Black Stallion). The deluxe edition includes a book with some notes from the band about the songs (well, one comment per song. Again, more would've been nice) and a lot of photos. 

One thing that particularly bugs me about this release is that the regular 4LP version looks so much better than this one. I saw it in a shop the other day and thought "I wish I'd bought that one instead" (regardless of the price and content). The black and white art looks so much cooler than the silver and white here - it's really bold and impressive. I ordered this long before images of each one were available, so I wasn't to know. I don't like the idea of "regret" in general, and I certainly don't regret buying this one, but in hindsight I kinda wish I'd spent my money differently - I have White Pony on vinyl, so I could've just bought the cd version to hear Black Stallion; if I'd loved Black Stallion (ha!) I could've then bought the 4LP and still have money to spare. Oh well, you live and you learn.

Format: 4x12", book, picture, picture sleeves

Tracks: 22

Cost: £110.99 new

Bought: Norman Records website

When: 26/02/21

Colour: Black

Etching: etching on side H

mp3s: cds

Mogwai - Come On Die Young

Some years ago I was explaining to a friend why I can never move away from having an iPod Classic (or another equally large capacity mp3 player, but I don't think there are any of note). The argument I gave was that there are days when you just really want to listen to some obscure Mogwai b-side, and that's exactly the music that wouldn't make the cut if you were worrying about capacity. At the time, I had The Hawk is Howling and the double cd re-release of Young Team, and it was precisely those bonus tracks I was thinking about. I got Young Team just before I started my PhD and those years were heavily soundtracked by post-rock on my trusty iPod in whatever library I found myself working in.

With that in mind, I was very keen to pick up this fancy boxset re-issue of Mogwai's second album Come On Die Young when it came out; 17 bonus songs was right up my alley. I ordered it from Norman Records because they offered free postage on orders over £50 - before that point I'd never heard of them, but I've since spent more money with them than I care to mention - as I've often said before, they cover almost everything I'm after outside of the Banquet Records and Truck Store remit (in fact, I'd say they're more in line with my musical tastes in terms of what they stock than either of the other two are, but these things always change in subtle ways). It's a lovely boxset, as can be seen in the pictures below, and well worth the money.

As for Come On Die Young itself, it wasn't an album I instantly loved. One entirely unnecessary anecdote first though - at some point in my early twenties I was in Cambridge with my friend Tom and his friends Caz, Jim and Luch. Luch was studying there and for some reason I'd gone up with Tom to get drunk there one night. I have absolutely no idea why we'd gone out in Cambridge - it wasn't easy to get to and I don't think I had any other business there at the time. I can't even remember how we got up there, or where I'd come from (Winchester, Cardiff?). It definitely did happen though, and I remember more about the drunken night that followed than the days around it, it seems. Anyway, Luch was a Mogwai fan and had a poster of the cover of CODY on the wall. As we were drinking, he was getting routined harassed with the line "Come on Luch, die young". I will never be able to think about this album without thinking about his close friends telling him to die young.

About a year after getting Young Team, I bought a cheap, second-hand copy of CODY on cd in one of the records stores on Berwick Street in London. I was excited to hear it since I'd heard that it was considered one of their best albums. I didn't get it straight away, like I had with the other two albums I owned, and it took a long time for me to give it another chance (I also bought Funcrusher Plus that day, and that got a lot of play). If it wasn't that I knew it was so highly regarded, I might have disregarded it entirely.

To me, CODY is a very strangely sequenced album. Despite being sandwiched between two perfect bookends (Punk Rock and Punk Rock/Puff Daddy/Antichrist), it feels a bit like it's on shuffle for the most part. What is certainly true is that the best songs, and the most traditionally Mogwai songs are all at the end. It's rare that "classic" albums are so back-heavy, with most being the opposite (meaning people often forget to notice that the back-half is a bit weak). In this case though, it works against the album - there's about half an hour of music before you get to a song that sounds like what I want from a Mogwai song (May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door). Ex-Cowboy is the first really incredible song on the album, and that's track nine. It's important to note though that Ex-Cowboy is really incredible. Of course, Christmas Steps is the real highlight, with it's slow start and bass-lead build up. It's almost as scary as the haunting face on the cover, and you want Mogwai to be scary, really.

At the other extreme, at the very start you have the title-track (of sorts) Cody which does nothing for me at all and couldn't be further from what I was expecting (which, I strongly suspect, is intentional). Sung vocals with an actual chorus and no big crescendos or heavy guitars. You can't help but believe they wanted that to feel a bit antagonistic. After the success of Young Team I imagine they took some pleasure in starting the album that way.

The third and fourth discs cover the 17 bonus tracks and we get a good mixture of demos, session and live tracks, as well as the Travels in Constants EP (from Temporary Residence Records excellent series of releases) and two rare songs, Nick Drake and Hugh Dallas. Of particular note are the shortened version of Christmas Steps, 7-25 with the fuzzed-out guitar thrashing, their cover of Papa M's Arundel (which took me ages to work out why it was familiar when I finally got a copy of Live From a Shark Cage), Spoon Test and Hugh Dallas which is pure Slint, but great for it. As expected, the bonus disc has had a good amount of play.

Format: 4x 12" boxset, double gatefold sleeves, inserts, poster, dvd
Tracks: 29
Cost: £54.50 new
Bought: Norman Records website
When: 06/08/14
Colour: Black
Etching: none
mp3s: dvd included