dan's jams - music reviews

Every 5 years or so, Tool ramps up for and delivers a new album unto their writhing masses. All the little Tool nerds and all the pimply faced teens who think the penis wrench t-shirts are the funniest all get worked up into a slather about the new Tool album and how great it's going to be. I'm not one of those though. I do all my worked-up slathering anticipation at home, away from prying eyes. Or at least I used to.

See, Aenima was perfect to me, or damn near it: thoughtful and mentally challenging, but still coated in the metal that kept it focused and direct. But somewhere after that album, it all started getting…well…heady. The band that rode the fence between the punishment of metal and the calculating (sterile) precision (perfectionism) of prog rock started landing more often in the proggy yard. Don't get me wrong, I like the occasional prog jerk-off of a Dream Theater or calculus rhythms of a band like Meshuggah, but Tool was on the brink of something far more epic than they're tending to become. This album just seems to throw another chapter into Tool's history chock full of math riffs and extended long-play jammery. And they do it really well, this album is horrifyingly precise and complex, and I dare say you won't find another band doing anything this cranial this well.

But the songs, they do go on. Phish on acid with metal guitars. It meanders with breathtaking precision, and occasionally drops into passages of cohesion and force that work really well and remind us of the band that used to split the difference between art-band and crushing power. It's almost as if this title could have been a punishing masterpiece had it been condensed down into about 4,000 days, instead of the full 10,000. I just don't know if I can get high enough to truly appreciate what they're doing now, so take that thought with you. If you like it all brained up and fully appreciable with a master's degree in music under your belt, this title is all you.