Each hour a pearl, each pearl a prayer
To still a heart in absence wrung
I tell each bead unto the end
And there a cross is hung…
—“The Rosary” (Ethelbert Nevin/Robert Cameron Rogers)
Text, photo, and live videos by Jason Lee
You gotta love it when an artist doesn’t merely tread water after gaining some acclaim but instead keeps branching out and leveling up which can be a good thing not only aesthetically but also longterm career-wise just ask Chino Moreno cuz if he’d simply kept remaking 1997’s grungy alt-metal classic Around the Fur with his fellow Deftones—or even 1995’s more nü-metal-ish Adrenaline—the band coulda coasted for years or maybe decades and done quite well esp. if they’d kept featuring scantily-clad sweaty party girlz from Seattle or Sacramento on their album covers but by this time they’d most likely be touring the State Fair Circuit with a Monsters Of Nü Metal package tour or some such and hey there’s nothing wrong with that…
…but instead about a week ago Mr. Moreno performed two back-to-back nights of largely untested-in-live-settings new music by his somewhat recently revived side project ††† a.k.a. Crosses alongside childhood friend/producer/mutli-instrumentalist and longtime collaborator Shaun Lopez (Far, The Revolution Smile) minus former bassist Chuck Doom and just a couple months ago the duo released their sophomore full-length Good Night, God Bless, I Love U, Delete. into the wild…
…which comes nearly a decade after their first LP but relatively on-the-heels of Crosses’ 2002 comeback EP PERMANENT.RADIANT all of which heard for the first time live by the sold-out, amped-up crowd with more than a few singing along to nearly every word in the cavernous yet somehow still intimate environs of Brooklyn’s most catholic with a little “c” multi-leveled “underground and unbound” music venue/dance club/arts space Elsewhere which is like a theme park of cool (sorry Brooklyn Steel, you’re cool too!) which beats going at a state fair except for there being no dairy cattle herding contest so ok it’s debatable…
…but a victory of a lap nonetheless cuz here are two musical veterans debuting a clutch of new material with the passion of a scrappy up-and-coming band and dang I gotta admit getting spine tingles from the moment the house lights came down with Perry Como singing “The Rosary” blasting over the sound system and when it got to the line “to kiss the cross, sweetheart” the three translucent crosses hanging over the stage were suddenly illuminated from within and I can’t help but wonder if Shaun or Chino stole ‘em from a neighbor’s gaudy front lawn Christmas display like you’d expect a scrappy up-and-coming band to do…
…but hey we ain’t tellin’ and anyway the kaleidoscopic color-changing crosses fit perfectly with Elsewhere’s always dramatic stage lighting in a fittingly grandiose opening salvo for a band whose last appearance in our fair city/borough was way back in February 2014 at Music Hall of Williamsburg (still with us!) and Santos Party House (no longer with us) back in February 2014 and as the duo sauntered on stage the music shifted from Como’s somnambulant supplications to the pulsating electronic strains of “Invisible Hand” (sometimes I feel / like a ghost in chains) with its chopped-up vocal sample sounding like a choir of angels doing a Balinese monkey chant as the crowd let out a collective roar and then when the growling sub-bass hits your viscera well fuggitaboutit…
…and so it went over the course of the night as Chino prowled the stage like an uncaged tiger applying his trademark whisper-to-an-unholy-scream vocals to †††’s idiosyncratic fusion of darkwave, industrial, goth, dreampop, shoegaze and who knows what else as Shaun (the band’s official multitasker) kept busy moving from playing keyboards to triggering sequences to strumming white-noise guitar chords and back to keyboards again as the pair just-as-nimbly traversed a wide range of sonic landscapes from atmospheric to aggressively in-the-red (we love it when you feel the music as much as hear it) with everything dialed up to a level of heaviosity that’s unusual for electronic-based acts to achieve…
…and just hearing the songs played live really drove home how you can detect the sedimented layers of the duo’s expansive history across their many musical phases in Crosses’ latest stuff (to these ears anyway) and how it also seems like a direct sequel to Deftones’ latest release 2020’s White Pony/Black Stallion—a 20th-anniversary re-release of the paradigm-shifting White Pony alongside a brand new track-by-track remix of the entire album, i,e., Black Stallion, remixed by the likes of DJ Shadow, Clams Casino, Phantogram, and Robert Smith a.k.a. the “Gothfather,” the latter of whom even makes a guest appearance on Good Night’s penultimate track “Girls Float † Boys Cry” perhaps returning the favor for the Deftones’ superlative cover of the Cure’s Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me deep cut “If Only Tonight We Could Sleep”.,..
…cuz this new record likewise pushes the duo’s catholic with a little “c” range of influences to their farmost extremes (White Pony was notable at the time for bringing alt-rock and electro-ambient elements into modern metal with Black Stallion only upping the ante of this stylistic catholicism) which is just what ††† does with their latest material and hey maybe there’s a reason they’re called Crosses what with crossing all those musical histories and influences but without skimping on the hooks either so if you were ever into any of Chino or Shaun’s various iterations it’s advised you catch ’em when they hit the road again in February and March of 2024…