Melodic Rage, Pure and Simple

Rage is not enough. The best hard rock offers more, layering complex musical ideas and raw emotion amid all the screaming and thrashing, finding something deeper and lasting even within the hardest metal passages. For the Deftones, it has meant music that is frequently harsh, yet with the occasional brooding, expansive scope of Pink Floyd.

At the Hollywood Palladium on Thursday, the Deftones were at their most stripped down and direct, losing some of the melodic ideas that you find on record in the muddy roar. But even beneath the storm of white noise, there would emerge some delicate vocal melody or subdued instrumental passage, suggesting the band is as interested in stretching out as rocking out.

The Sacramento quintet’s third album, “White Pony,” offers a fine-tuning of the punk-metal-rap blend Deftones helped create after forming a decade ago. The sound on the record is sharper, as singer Chino Moreno’s vocals seethe with well-timed restraint. It’s a formula similar to the one that has made massive figures of Korn and Limp Bizkit, though in many ways Deftones owe more to the example of Rage Against the Machine.

New songs such as “Feiticeira” and “Pink Maggit” roar with energy and finesse, making them just as fitting for pop radio as for the Palladium’s steamy head-banging session. Deftones’ messages stray far from the simple black-and-white words of most metal acts, even as Moreno resorts to dark imagery (knives, breakdowns, etc.), adding elements evocative of torment and intelligence.

On Thursday, the harder rock tendencies got the most attention, with Moreno roaring into his microphone. What he did was often not quite singing, not quite rapping, but he somehow communicated emotion in a real way.

Moreno spent much of his time not on stage at all, but wading into the outstretched hands of the fans up front, handing over his microphone briefly to whatever crowd-surfer was passing by. “We’ve got some savages out there,” Moreno declared midway into the 90-minute set, after most of the buttons had been ripped from his shirt.

Too often, the band’s more delicate ingredients were completely lost, turning some of the show into a monotonous roar. But if the concert leaned most heavily toward the band’s harder-edged side, the Deftones did manage to briefly slow things down to a moody quiet, if only to set things up for the next metallic explosion.

With the ideas epitomized by “White Pony,” Deftones have joined their neo-metal brethren Korn and crossed the divide from cult band to larger commercial and creative force.