Unfortunately, it's an intensity too few music fans will experience. The Deftones have been largely ignored precisely by the kind of people who'd most enjoy them, primarily because of their long-time association with the baggy-pants crowd (Korn, Bizkit), their own frequent sporting of said pants, and the simple fact that they aren't British. But the band has always admitted to musical influences that'd get booed right off the Summer Sanitarium stage, from Violator-era Depeche Mode to Pinkerton-era Weezer. Radiohead at their best also clearly shaped the band into its current brilliant form. With any luck, Thom will pick up Deftones on his next swing through the States, and the favor will be returned. It won't be a moment too soon.

* (To digress for a minute, in a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Thom suggested that as bad as Saddam Hussein is, the weakening of the UN precipitated by the US and UK is worse. If I could I'd point out to him that the UN always did whatever the US (or, in its day, the USSR) wanted to do anyway, and that though it might now appear to be a counterbalance to the US's power, perhaps an organization that puts Libya in charge of the Human Rights commission isn't much of a moral arbiter. He also explained that the whole album stems from the sinking feeling he got while hearing the BBC report that Bush stole the 2000 election. I wasn't thrilled about that at the time by any stretch of the imagination, but I'll just say that if I were to record a politically-charged album between late 2001 and early 2003, I'd probably be focusing on a certain even that took place eleven months after that election. But that's enough of that.)

Sean T. Collins is a professional writer and editor who reserves the right to change his mind about everything if and when the Bush Administration cancels the 2004 elections. Until then he blogs at Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat, where this post originally appeared.