Album Review: Crosses (†††) - Self-Titled

So, a long time ago (2011), Pitchfork had a headline that read something like, “Deftones dude has a Witch House project.” This was the summer after the very short-lived Internet fascination with the theoretical genre “Witch House,” sometimes also terrifyingly and offensively known as “Rape Gaze.” Whatever you want to call it, interest peaked in 2010, with the release of Salem’s record King Night, along with whatever other spooky sounding artists putting things like triangles and crosses in their name happened to be popping up around that same time.

“Witch House” takes codeine drenched, chopped and screwed hip-hop beats and mixes them up with horrifying synthesizers, and then on top of all that, often unintelligible, yet incredibly unsettling lyrics. The trend has since, for the most part, passed, and has become not really a joke so much, but more of a, “Hey, remember when everyone was really into Witch House?”

So back to that Pitchfork headline from 2011—it’s misleading. Deftones dude, a.k.a Chino Moreno, did not start a Witch House band. Crosses, or often as it is stylized, †††, is a more restrained style of experimental electronic rock music, with heavy emphasis on pop hooks, and it more than likely was dubbed “Witch House” because of the fact that there are three crosses in the name of the band, a cross replacing a “T” in every song title, and the band’s reliance on spooky imagery in its album artwork.

Moreno has been a busy guy for the last four years. Since reviving the Deftones in 2010 with Diamond Eyes, then again in 2012 with Koi No Yokan, he’s also started a dream pop/post-rock outfit with the surviving members of Isis, called Palms. And then, of course, there’s this Crosses thing. What Moreno has unfortunately not returned to is his once promising side-project Team Sleep. Crosses could actually be looked at like a Team Sleep 2.0 in a sense. It’s similar in its interest and its intent in experimenting, though it never crosses a certain line of going just “too far out there.”

After issuing two EPs over the course of the last few years, †††, or Crosses, as it were, combines the previously released tracks from said EPs, along with five new songs.

Crosses is sequenced to give a cohesive feel to the fifteen tracks included, and it succeeds in that. The running time isn’t incredibly long—under an hour—but looking at fifteen songs in a track list can be a tad overwhelming at first, given how short a lot of records are these days. I would stop short of saying that any of the songs are “filler” material, but Crosses may be slightly more effective if it had been paired down slightly to focus more on the newer material, only including the “best” tracks off of the earlier EPs.

Fans of Chino Moreno’s work with the Deftones will know that when dude isn’t shredding his larynx, he has a gorgeous, chilling singing voice. In Crosses he gets the chance to show that off. Crosses make very “big” sounding music—there are some huge pop moments on the record—“†he Epilogue,” for example is incredibly powerful sounding; the kind of song that wouldn’t be out of place playing as the ending credits of a big budget movie rolled. I don’t really know if “modern rock” radio plays the Deftones or not, but I’d say that a song like this is entirely too triumphant and upbeat to be played in the same hour as something like Godsmack. Wait, do people still play Godsmack on the radio?

Crosses runs the spectrum of emotions—it’s moody at times, but it’s also very hopeful sounding, and occasionally it manages to cram both of those into the same song. I don’t know if describing certain aspects of it as “feel good” is accurate, but there are larger than life sing-a-long moments, like “Blk S†allion” and “Prurien†.” When the refrain hits, you really can’t help but want to shout the words along, and pump your fist emphatically with the beat.

The attempt at mystery behind the band—the occulty imagery and murky aesthetics are an interesting juxtaposition when you think about just how accessible this record is for a listener. At the heart of it, Crosses is pop music. There’s nothing wrong with that at all—Moreno has gone on record many times talking about his love of acts like The Cure, and it’s great to see that he has an outlet for that now when he’s not eviscerating his vocal cords with screams and shouts in the Deftones. Crosses, as a whole, is a relatively solid listen. It falters at times slightly with momentum issues—some songs attempt o be more moody sounding than others—but in a music marketplace where when you think of “pop” music, you think of teens as the audience, and you think of people like Miley Cyrus or Katy Perry as star performers, Chino Moreno and Crosses show that even metal dudes can create pop music by adults, for adults.

Crosses is out on Tuesday, February 11th, via Sumerian Records.