Slideshow: Deftones Rock the Ryman

The Spin is still slightly more hard of hearing and a little more blind after braving Wednesday night's triple-decibel, strobe-light-heavy Deftones show at the Ryman. That said, given the alt-metal elder statesmen's finely tuned, flawless crowd-euphoriating execution of a jaw-dropper-after-jaw-dropper 19-song best-of-style set list, the pleasure was worth the pain.

Pleasure and pain, it's a running aesthetic juxtaposition for a band that can shift from the fat-beat-heavy Hum-style hooky Cure-does-drone-metal of songs like "Change (In the House of Flies" and "Knife Party," to the sputtering agro-metal melodic riffage of headbangers like "Swerve City" and "Rickets." The transitions were airtight, packing the kind of a punch only a band with decades of hardcore road-dogging can. 

Deftones are one of the few rock acts that repeatedly came through Nashville when many other bands didn't. They played long-since-shuttered City Hall twice within six months in late 2006 and early 2007. Nashville rewarded that history by selling out the band's Mother Church debut. It's worth nothing that not only was this the band's biggest Nashville gig to date — something singer Chino Moreno humbly acknowledged with heartfelt reverence during a brief moment of stage banter — but also that the Ryman is close to twice the capacity of Marathon Music Works, where they last stopped in 2013. 

Whether he's jack-knifing his body to scream at the ground, making arm movements like a drunken conductor, swinging, whipping and tangling his microphone cable around his neck, or gracefully stumble-jumping about the stage, with his charismatic headshop-clerk-chill swagger and sensual New Romantic tenor, Moreno oozes an undeniable sex appeal uncommon among heavy metal frontmen. He's also perhaps the only metal singer who will ever pull off (or even attempt) closing a show by leading a Ryman crowd call-and-response-style through the chorus of Cypress Hill's "How I Could Just Kill a Man" while wearing a fading vintage Morrissey shirt. 

It also doesn't hurt that — at least when mostly backlit and seen from 15 feet away — the band, seven-string guitars, facial-hair coiffure and all, looks almost exactly like they did in the late '90s. Perhaps what (in addition to Nashville's population growth) explains the jump in ticket sales is that the band's music has aged just as well. That said, we were surprised they only played two songs from their critically acclaimed latest LP Gore — the only album by a band that's toured with Incubus and Slipknot to score a 7.8 on Pitchfork. Especially surprised seeing as how Gore standout "Prayers/Triangles" was a clear crowd-favorite highlight of the night. 

Anyway, those are just a few of The Spin's loose observations from the show. Now check out a gallery of rad photos below.