Tool - The Darkness in the Mind

Tool formed in Los Angeles in 1991, at the height of the grunge era. Singer Maynard James Keenan, drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Paul D’Amour managed to forge a terrifying, claustrophobic sound, an ideal soundtrack for the madness of an inmate confined to an isolation cell. It's highly psychological music, seemingly intent on prying open the most hidden recesses of the human psyche, where evil lurks waiting to be unleashed by some external stimulus. Tool's sound doesn't just reproduce the teachings of the masters of the '70s (certainly Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath and Blue Oyster Cult), but absorbs traits from a whole series of bands that made the history of the last 20 years of extreme rock.

The aggression of Metallica, the darkness of Swans, the savagery of early Soundgarden, the grinding tedium of Godflesh all echo through a highly spectacular sonic mosaic, somewhat at odds with the band's stated aim of making existential music. What sets Tool apart from the countless “heavy” bands populating the charts of that era is their reclaiming of certain '70s progressive traits, already perceptible in their earliest compositions, but which would become undeniably explicit on their later album, Lateralus.

The 1991 EP Opiate contains 6 tracks, two of which (“Cold and Ugly” and “Jerk-Off”) are live recordings. The sound is still in thrall to grunge and Led Zeppelin, as shown by the opening “Sweat”. “Part Of Me” is an almost progressive-rock charge with the bass up front. Overall, on this first release, it's the rhythm section rather than Keenan's taut, quivering vocals that takes the lead. Carey lays down breakneck rhythms, while D'Amour, in places (“Jerk-Off”), indulges in virtuoso flourishes worthy of John Myung (Dream Theater). The sound is frantic and tight at the same time.

With Undertow, Tool achieve a personal, recognizable style. The sound slows down and grows even darker, as shown by “Swamp Song”. The band's bluesy, passionate soul is present, but hard to decode, buried as it is in an orgy of distortion and martial rhythms, as on “4°”. On “Flood”, by contrast, it's the progressive soul that finally comes out into the open; for the first 4 minutes the instruments paint a fresco of pain and despair, further darkened by Keenan's metaphysical lament; the whole thing then spills into a furious hard-blues. “Disgustipated” is a long industrial ordeal in the style of Einsturzende Neubauten, where metallic clangs and the sound of presses accompany Keenan, who, rather than singing, seems to be dictating work rhythms to a multitude of alienated factory workers. It's the most original track on the record. “Intolerance”, “Prison Sex” and “Undertow” are, by contrast, more conventional compositions, where what stands out is the aggression of Keenan's formidable shout, which pounces hungrily on every note, lending the overall sound a dramatic grandiosity.

After about four years (during which D'Amour was replaced on bass by Justin Chancellor), Tool released their second album. If Undertow had represented the formal peak of the band, Aenima is something different. It marks the band moving beyond the classic rock-song format (which had still accompanied Tool up to that point), and is a decisive step toward more markedly progressive territory. Anguish and pain are conveyed through long suites, interspersed with instrumental interludes linking the various movements. “Third Eye” and “Die Eier Von Satan” embody the experimentation Tool had reached by this point. The single “Stinkfist” is the track most reminiscent of their old style, while on “Eulogy” it's hard to find a center of gravity, given how many changes of rhythm there are.

Legal disputes delay the album's release, and it takes five years to hear new Tool material, but the wait is not in vain. Lateralus (2001) is an album as perfect as it is profound. The band is at the peak of its powers, and David Bottrill's shimmering production manages to bring out the sound of every instrument, even in the most chaotic passages. Lateralus is an album of pure progressive rock; it's the album that drags progressive rock into the 2000s, trying to shake off the dust and give it a new guise, that of alternative metal. Imagine King Crimson's suites transfigured by metallic sounds, devastating rhythms, dissonant chords; what results is the end of the world, with Keenan as its prophet. This makes Tool's philosophy closer to the existential pessimism of Van Der Graaf Generator than to the exotic romanticism of King Crimson.

The album opens with the imposing “The Grudge”, which builds slowly before exploding. The instruments lay down a tribal rhythm over which Keenan's voice is grafted, calm at first, then angry, then ferocious. “The Patient” and “Schism” share the same structure: a calm beginning, steady build-up, explosion and sudden shifts in rhythm, final catharsis. Keenan seems intent on penetrating the human soul only to turn it inside out. “Parabol” is the lament of a Tibetan monk, and sets the stage for “Parabola”, which instead hammers away from start to finish. “Disposition” is the calmest of the bunch, yet at the same time the most menacing; Keenan mumbles words over a melodic carpet woven from the interplay of the various instruments, which seem to converse with one another. Despite its overall length and the tracks' less-than-easy assimilation, the record remains listenable, as each composition paves the way for the next, stirring curiosity about what's to come.

Lateralus is Tool's masterpiece, an album light-years away from the band's original premises, the record that demonstrates these musicians' talent and creativity.

Meanwhile, the A Perfect Circle project was born, the brainchild of sound engineer Billy Howerdel (who had already worked with Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails) and born out of his meeting with Maynard. The supergroup is rounded out by Troy Van Leeuwen (ex-Failure), Josh Freese (previously with Paul Westerberg) and bassist Paz Lenchantin. In 2000 they released Mer de Noms, a futuristic grunge album where the genre's stylistic hallmarks are evident, but where everything is steeped in industrial rhythms, avant-garde sounds and progressive-rock atmospheres, followed in 2004 by Thirteenth Step, more refined and influenced by both progressive rock and Tool.

In 2006 came the new chapter in the Tool saga, 10000 Days. The band's chaotic, circular form is seized by an expressive urgency never before encountered with such surgical precision as on the opening track: “Vicarious” unfolds into a crescendoing whirlwind, an apocalypse manifested in the ruthless (but never trite) rhetoric of its lyrics, a j'accuse against the media's exploitation of pain. Keenan's religiosity clashes with brutalization, combining with a starker, more stripped-down instrumental aggression, a powerful vortex that startles when the voice chants, like a pop hook, “La, la, la, la, la, la-la-lie”, placing the ridiculous and the stupid on the same plate. The roughness of the sound and the constant construction-deconstruction recalls Meshuggah as much as Slint and the “post” movement; and while the former can be invoked for “Jambi”, a kind of “Pushit” for the new millennium, charged with animal aggression and ambivalence between rage and love, the whole post-rock experience is instead reinterpreted by Tool in the title track (in two movements), which stands as one of the band's artistic and emotional peaks.

"10000 Days": ten thousand days for 27 years of pain. A track centered on Keenan's deep relationship with his mother Judith, with his voice whispering and enunciating lines steeped in gratitude and despair: "Didn't have a life. But surely saved one". The sparseness of the instrumentation recalls the ethereal atmospheres of Labradford, which are then charged with pathos in the second part, where the rhythm turns nervous and urgent; the swelling pulse of drums and bass together with Adam Jones's guitar build a paranoid, claustrophobic environment, within which Maynard's need to come to terms with his own past plays out. This is the key to reading everything that comes before and after on the record; it becomes clear that everything is aimed at celebrating and ritualizing a difficult, turbulent mother-son relationship, and for the first time the lyrics clearly reveal an extremely sensitive human side, with a violent emotional impact and no lyrical compromises.

From here a path of self-analysis unfolds, in which every obstacle and relational difficulty is relived, and the example of "The Pot" is emblematic: Keenan himself mimics his mother's voice at the song's opening, before descending into a sonic inferno that winks at post-hardcore and accelerations close, in sheer force, to Lateralus. The building blocks of "Rosetta Stoned" seem to come straight from the previous album, with the drumming once again powerful and relentless, alternating - perhaps a bit too formulaically - moments of tension with rhythmic expansions, over which the words and Adam Jones's tight guitar riffs flow like magma.

As is customary, the final triptych marks a slight sonic departure from the rest of the album. The litany of "Intension" is a slow farewell to the nightmares that enveloped the preceding tracks. African percussion and a soft bass build a bed for the recited dirge: the detachment is total, and it's precisely with an eye toward returning to oneself that "Right In Two" develops; the rational mind seeks the reasons behind everything that happened. In a crescendo that runs parallel between awareness and sonic power, the percussion returns and the soundscape expands, becoming a trail over which Keenan repeats the phrase "cutting our love in two", symbolizing the need to let go. The closer is entrusted to the indecipherable "Vigenti Tres", in which sounds resembling a tired, labored breath - or perhaps something else - recur. Tool-decoding obsessives will tear their hair out over this one, even though this album is far less hermetic than its predecessors.

The shift toward a more direct, communicative sound is obvious, as is the band's ability to carve out a unique place on today's musical landscape. What evolves is their way of communicating, and with this latest turn Tool brand an entire decade, one that began in 1996 with Ænima.

Between lawsuits, announced delays, various release-date confirmations later denied, veiled friction between Maynard and the rest of the band, and a certain playful mischief in how they used social media to communicate with fans, Tool took a full thirteen years before returning to the scene with Fear Inoculum (2019).

The album is hefty and massive, running a full 86 minutes across ten songs, more than half of which exceed 10 minutes, with the rest made up almost entirely of ambient interludes. This time the band indulges, with the reins let loose, in a sound that's less alternative-metal and far more squarely in line with progressive-metal, something the Americans had never done so explicitly before. The result is a cerebral, intricate, hazy and enveloping work. In the more layered guitar passages you can also hear the influence of Dave Navarro from the first two Jane's Addiction albums. The production aims for a dark, dry sound, which unfortunately compresses the guitar and drum tones somewhat, though not excessively.

What dominates here are long instrumental interweavings, set in motion by an Adam Jones who has never sounded so mature and solid in his lead parts, driving the songs forward. Jones is perfectly in tune with the album's reflective, dark mood, but when needed he pulls out more aggressive riffs that come close to the heaviest moments of 10,000 Days, before returning to embrace a more sophisticated sound. Justin Chancellor and Danny Carey, meanwhile, show off a monstrous rhythm section, highly technical yet always restrained, never drifting into self-indulgent virtuosity. Overall the record is led and dominated by Adam Jones, with Danny Carey often stealing the spotlight with his effortless mastery, filling the rhythm section with varied, experimental percussive performances that are, at times, even more creative in terms of sound, interlocking parts and numerous tempo changes than on previous albums, full of unpredictable dynamic twists that are, as usual, complex and never obvious. It's no exaggeration to call him one of the best drummers alive today. The three of them form the backbone of the entire album and act in synergy as a single body, even if Chancellor this time takes a step back into the shadows compared to how central his contribution was on previous records.

What's conspicuously less present, however, is Maynard James Keenan, both quantitatively - since there are relatively few passages where he actually comes in - and qualitatively, since his voice has a narrower range and is far less powerful than in the past, even when he tries to unleash impetuous screams. Occasionally Maynard tries to follow softer, more effects-laden tones, in some ways close to the vocal lines of Eat The Elephant. Overall, the impression of recent years is that his relationship with the rest of the band has cooled somewhat, or rather that Maynard seems more disengaged and less devoted to Tool (preferring to focus on Puscifer or the revived A Perfect Circle). This has repercussions on the overall expressiveness of the tracks, given that they're all built from self-contained compositions onto which the histrionic American frontman then adds his vocal interpretation, here less engaged than the band's usual standard. Maynard sounds much more detached than on previous albums, and in many spots where the music would call for a vocal, he chooses to stay silent and let the other instruments speak, a choice he had rarely made before. With the exception of "Culling Voices", a track that would lose all its expressive power without its grandiose, orientally-tinged and melodically shifting vocal lines, "Fear Inoculum" is decidedly not a Maynard-centered album, and in this it's unbalanced compared to its predecessors. And yet, the examples of "Pneuma" and "Invincible" in particular show how well this approach can work, with vocal parts chosen tactically and sparingly that stick in your head immediately. He remains an excellent vocalist; simply, in the context of his career, this is among his less convincing performances. His lyrics are particularly cryptic, with the number 7 seeming to be a recurring theme, and at least this time they're included for the first time in the release.

The title track, in theory also the album's lead single, was made available three weeks before release. Its atmospheres are exotic and vaguely psychedelic, recalling in this sense the most tribal moments of Lateralus (like the long "Reflection"). It's a Buddhist Zen meditation on conquering the enemy (in this case fear) without killing it, but instead recognizing it and watching it flee. The progression, which unfolds slow and inexorable like the coils of a snake, is underscored by Carey's ethnic-flavored drumming and Maynard's delicate voice, before flowing into "Pneuma", meditative and measured, true to the most reflective side of Tool, before spilling into a more searing prog-metal, with the final 4 minutes (from the exotic electro-ethnic break to the sung climax, all carried by a Carey playing beyond human limits) constituting one of the compositional and emotional peaks of the record. Its initially subdued moods set up "Invincible", rarefied and driven by hypnotic, relentless percussion, mesmerizing at first before building into a lysergic crescendo that gives way to Maynard's vocal filters and, in the conclusion, a climax of distorted riffs. The song deals with a warrior's past, returned to the battlefield and "struggling to remain consequential", which can be read as a metaphor for the band, or for making art in general. It then evolves into a slow, exceptional build-up toward the super-catchiness of the galloping, stone-grinding riff and then Adam Jones's guitar fireworks. The way the band builds the first 8 minutes into a crescendo is masterful, finding a perfect climax in how it then breaks away into the semi-synthetic interlude before kicking back in with calculated fury. As in the title track, what's especially hypnotic here is Chancellor's bass work, which elsewhere on this record (unlike on 10,000 Days) rarely steals the spotlight from Jones and Carey.

The emphatic tones then explode into the majestic "Descending", which, from how it opens, could almost be an A Perfect Circle track, before venturing into epic, transcendent territory, using harmonic progressions to build a peak of drama that is perhaps a bit too explicit, but at least features Jones once again at his most stratospheric. As in "Pneuma", here too the final 4 minutes are the best part, and they're nothing short of incredible. It is in fact one of the compositional peaks of Jones's entire career, with long stretches where he carves out a leading role, clearly having studied every note with obsessive attention to detail, delivering a performance of real emotional impact with a level of detail comparable to Lateralus and to Jane's Addiction in their golden years.

"Culling Voices" falls back into the more reflective, melancholic register of Tool, with minimalist tones and psychoanalytic-existentialist moods, before a cadenced, psychedelic guitar takes over.

The peak of the album is undoubtedly the "Pneuma-Invincible-Descending" sequence, the expressive and compositional heart of the work. Throughout the record there's a mood that is perhaps the most mature and darkest the band has ever achieved, even compared to the previous 10,000 Days - which, aside from its two title tracks, incredibly ends up sounding almost adolescent by comparison to "Fear Inoculum".

"Chocolate Chip Trip", on the other hand, is a long ethno/ambient interlude, opening with a cyberpunk-flavored synth loop that repeats throughout, later joined by a long drum solo from Carey, with minimalist percussive beds in the style of Steve Reich spilling into a heart-pounding river of drum rolls.

"7empest", finally, is the longest suite on the album (15 minutes) and shows its most aggressive side: opened by an arpeggio that recalls "Frame by Frame" by King Crimson, it reaches its climax in a stunning, hallucinogenic solo from Jones, who, moving between semi-sludge riffs and effects-laden phrasing, drifts throughout the track between King Buzzo and Vernon Reid; but aside from that, the track plays like a patchwork of riffs and ideas lacking the unifying compositional spark that would give it a soul: it seems to lean toward mannerism and fan service (with all-too-explicit attempts to replicate now "Vicarious", now half the tracks from Undertow) rather than feeling genuine, with the result that from the bass to the vocals, and in this case even the lyrics, there's a sense of fatigue and box-checking - a risk that, to be fair, many expected from this comeback, but one that is thankfully absent from the rest of the tracks.

Among the brief ambient/electronic interludes, the dark-ambient thriller of "Legion Inoculant" blends well into the flow and would work nicely in the soundtrack of a Lynch film, while "Litanie contre la Peur" and the closing "Mockingbeat" are decidedly forgettable.

In all this, however, one important element is missing: the revolutionary scope that had made some of Tool's earlier albums into landmarks straddling the turn of the century. Here that ambition is set aside in favor of a refined, skillful consolidation of the band's more complex coordinates. From this point of view, Fear Inoculum doesn't surprise, coming across instead as an excellent follow-up to the most progressive moments of Lateralus and the dark, mature compactness that dominates much of 10,000 Days. It's confirmation that the quartet's compositional and performing skills haven't dimmed with the years.

Contributions by Matthias Stepancich and Alessandro Mattedi (“Fear Inoculum”)

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