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Five of Tool’s releases immediately entered the top of the iTunes sales rankings, and the band became the first ever to occupy all 10 leading spots on Billboard’s Rock Digital Song Sales chart. Even many of the onetime diehards (ahem) let their devotion lapse when their CDs scratched and their iPods fritzed.Įarlier this month, though, the band flung open its survival-shelter doors and put the bulk of its music online, finally.
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The band kept its music off streaming and download platforms. Nor has there been an easy way for it to be rediscovered and redissected since its absence. If Tool was a best-selling alternative to a mainstream branded as alternative, that’s not a paradigm that computes anymore. Rock still matters, but as a rumor, an input, in the ongoing brainstorm-between rap and everything else-that represents American pop today. By the time the band’s frightening bass lines and abject-trauma themes had been sucked into a popular nu-metal movement lacking mystery and brains, 2001’s Lateralus fell from the sky like a 1,000-page New Testament, or at least like a textbook dusted with DMT.īut today, even the wave of car-commercial guitar pop that was cresting around the time of the band’s 2006 motley, 10,000 Days, has crashed and dissipated. As grunge issued a culture-wide call to bond over psychic wounds by comparing calluses, Tool responded with gnarlier body-and-soul horror than many were prepared for. There’s a sense of something being deeply wrong, but it’s not articulated.Īnd that, rather than tunes, hooks, or even words, is the root of its addictive quality.A heavy-metal giant is awakening from a 13-year slumber, but does the domain it once ruled remain? From the early ’90s to 2006, the foursome of Tool stood as a rock-and-roll epitome when rock and roll was a social average. The single ‘Schism’ might be one of their most melodic pieces yet, but opening track ‘The Grudge’ sets the tone of grave menace that takes hold of the LP, yet which is not explained. The comparison holds thematically true as well. This LP has gone to the top of the US charts, beating Missy Elliott by 300,000 sales. And as America has taken Radiohead’s work to heart, so it looks like they have with Tool, too. There’s songs about crawling, dying, explosions, aliens and even one about ‘Ticks And Leeches’ to satisfy any craving for big, serious and grimy themes. Though it’s definitely a million times more metal than anything the Oxford miserablists have recorded, ‘Lateralus’ still easily contains the same amount of misery and self-obsessed navel-gazing. In this respect at least, they’re the metal Radiohead. There’s no trickery – Tool’s progressiveness is all their own work.
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Singer Maynard James Keenan has been unaffected by the comparative tunefulness of his side project A Perfect Circle, while the stripped-down nature of the instrumentation means that Tool’s innate heaviness shines out in a world of production tricks and dodges. Somehow, mysteriously, ‘Lateralus’ has added a little more colour to their palette of chanting, drumming and high drama. Their past two LPs (1993’s ‘Undertow’ and ’96’s ‘Aenima’) used the same principles to make essentially blank, grey walls of noise. They don’t appear in their own videos their uncompromising stance is all.Īll admirable stuff, but it hasn’t, in the past, helped Tool make any particularly good records. It doesn’t sound like a particularly great prospect, all told – but in the world of metal, this is more evidence of Tool’s great individuality. Their music is highly structured, composed of loads of complex parts, has no choruses, no hooks, and no verses either, really. Tool’s thing, basically, is progressive rock. This LP took five years to make, lasts 76 minutes and the most straightforward song title on it is ‘Eon Blue Apocalypse’. Name-dropped by nu-metallers, consistently cited as the most influential American group of the last ten years, they’re big, they’re quite clever, and don’t they just know it. Tool are clearly not a band afraid of their own gravitas.