[live review] Deftones @ the House of Blues 03.05.13

Over the course of a 25-year career as a band you're going to draw a pretty broad spectrum of ages to your shows, especially if you've been churning out the type of eternally young and bummed fury that DEFTONES have perfected. The crowd at the House of Blues on Tuesday night was a mix of the young and the young at heart, if not necessarily the young at hair. A recurring refrain among the 30-something crowd I was with, or anyone I mentioned the show to yesterday was "Oh man, that brings me back to high school." That's partly true, the band's 1997 Around the Fur, and 2000 White Pony were staples of the alienation-wave metal that many of us turned to (via no friends) at the time. 

But it's a mistake to think of the band as just a nostalgia act. In fact, their most recent two albums, Diamond Eyes, and last year's Koi No Yokan, are some of the best work they've ever done. They shuffled tracks from the earlier albums, "Change [In the House of Flies]", "Lotion," "My Own Summer," in with newer standouts, like "Rocket Skates," "Tempest," and "Diamond Eyes," and it was, surprisingly, the newer tracks the landed the hardest in an already hit-heavy set.

The only nostalgia I was feeling by the end of it was for all the way back yesterday, and the 100 or so days before that, when I was listening to "Swerve City."