Heather and I listened to the new Tool album, Fear Inoculum, as we drove out and back to our gig at Firestone’s last night. It’s long enough that it made a good driving companion out and back, intriguing enough that I was eager to return to it after our three hour bar gig, aggressive enough that it made the drive go by a little faster, fascinating enough that it kept us engaged and awake for the 2am drive home – and though I would NOT argue it’s “worth the wait” it’s definitely “worth your while”.
If you like Tool that is.
And I don’t mean “if you liked ‘Sober’ or ‘the Pot’ or any one song… but I mean if you like Tool… the slowly but ever-evolving dark metal band with its sometimes inaccessible complexity and woven beauty, aggressive melodrama and sometimes-overbearing artsy persona.
And I Love Tool.
Brutal beats, melodic drum lines, intricate rhythm shifts and tight, dramatic, dark melodies. Excitingly visceral guitar tones, whines, scrapes… and there’s Maynard in there somewhere too – but he’s far less forefront than he’s been in previous albums. Everything that Tool does, they’re doing it here. Hard, fast, slow, sludgy, grinding, dripping, contrasty and intense. Fierce and furious.
In general – I’d encourage this to be an ALBUM – most of the songs frankly don’t stand out. They fade one to the next creating an intense, moody soundscape in which no song really stands distinct. Part of this is the way in which Maynard’s vocals really take the backseat – or are even entirely absent – from the majority of the album. There are a couple of exciting new tones, a couple of things that sound a little cut-and-paste from previous discs, but generally speaking, if you like Tool, you’ll like this – but you’re probably not going to come away with a new favourite Tool tune.
It’s great music to drive to, to lose yourself in, dare I say it: I could even imagine swaying and kind of dancing to it in a kind of trancey way. This album highlights their musical proficiency in a way that makes me think of a dark metal Grateful Dead (except all the jams are in Dm rather than E!) – but for all that it’s their first album in over a decade, I could just as easily be convinced that the album is the product of the band going into the basement and jamming all night and editing the tracks as the idea that the album was so long in coming because they’ve been carefully writing and rewriting every twisting rhythm and achingly intricate harmonic whine.
All-according-to-plan or all seat-of-the-pants, I wish the hold-in-your-hand package felt quite as uniformly beautiful.
I’ve always Loved Tool’s packaging, and it’s always been unique with interesting gadget inclusions that have enhanced the whole into a must-have physical item, pushing the boundaries of the case itself away from being simply a container for the art of the audio two a three (and four!) dimensional extension of the overall art.
The packaging for this album is no exception – but the gadget inclusion is a let-down. An otherwise beautiful artifact with a chunky technological gimmick stuck in the middle. A beautiful book, Lovely textured papers, and a video that would be forgettable if it wasn’t playing at you from inside a CD boxed set. The chunky necessity of the cheapest-possible hardware to enable the video player undermines the elegance of the rest of the OBJET… for all that the audio of the album is such a flawless whole, it’s a shame that the physicality of the album is broken by such an under-baked inclusion enabling an instantly forgettable CGI video with ambient sound that would serve better as a downloadable screensaver than as the apparent centerpiece of a long-awaited audio / visual triptych.
I’m over it. It’s about the music and the gimmickry of packaging perhaps HAS to become even gimmickier in an age where most people are streaming their musical intake, and frankly any encouragement for the audience to own (and listen to) the ENTIRE album is a good thing – as this album is going to suck as just a random track in your Spotify playlist.
Tool’s not an “accessible” band. They didn’t start as one and have gotten increasingly so. The songs are longer, more complicated, the lyrics more obfuscated. The album takes time to lose oneself in, and it’s worth that time. Tool has never played well within pop radio conventions and I feel that they really take the time to EXPLORE a riff, a rhythm, a scream or a squeal. And exploring those things with them takes time. It’s worth the journey, but the I doubt any individual track will stand well on its own. It takes more than any one of these over 10 minute long tracks to really fall into the Tool trance.
But again, I think it’s worth it.
You know, if you like Tool already.
