Diamond Eyes is red...soaking wet.
Its far more livelier than Saturday Night Wrist, with a more straightforward approach to being loud and seemingly less complex. The synths are less apparent with the main focus on guitars, drums, and vocals. Even the lyrics, though as beautiful as ever have become more frank than we're accustomed to hearing from frontman, Chino Moreno. However, the most charismatic feature of Diamond Eyes is attitude. This album doesn't walk it gambols across, head nodding and lips licked provocatively, it taunts and teases, titillates and even torments the listeners who feel like more as the songs creep across their skulls.
From the heavy drive structure of Rocket Skates to the swing bounce of You've Seen the Butcher, to the way Chino's voice rides the beat on Risk and Prince; there is definitely a lot of new elements indigenous to this album that the band has introduced to their repertoire. There is also the noticeable absence of electronic drum programming, almost a tradition since White Pony's Teenager and later followed by Lucky You and Pink Cellphone. Diamond Eyes takes it back to Around the Fur, which was the last album to contain a title track.
The lyrics seem to be about intimacy, trust, and truth, subsurface appearances and the nakedness of one's true identity. Though, as a result the songs sound like they're about sex, a subject that is well adept to teach all of the aforementioned ideas. This is just my impression of the words. I mentioned above that Chino is at his most frank, well thats only in comparison to his other albums; he no doubt still retains that elusiveness that so trademarks his words.
While we're talking opinions, Rocket Skates is the penultimate song of this album. Abe's drumming and Chino's guitar are having so much fun and yet the song is deadly and seems like it might fly out of control at any point. Delgado's sine waves are like background warnings, while the lyrics are sweet and proud, threatening and flirtatious. You don't know whether you want to fight or fuck when you hear it.
