I came late to the music of Tool. In a way, I consider this a personal mistake not unlike the way I ignored Iron Maiden for so many years before really listening…but then again, I am also sympathetic to the idea that art has a certain currency in time for each of us, and maybe my time for Tool was exactly right after all.
At this point, I’ll not quibble about that. It’s difficult to express just how powerful the impact has been. (Hell, it’s still blooming, with little sign even of leveling off.)
The steamroller first started with Rick Beato’s excellent “What Makes This Song Great” analyses of Schism and Parabol/Parabola, both from the Lateralus album. I thought I’d create a Pandora station seeded on Tool, but was disappointed to find out that (at that time) there wasn’t any Tool music on the streaming services. Well, as luck would have it, Santa then gifted me the Lateralus record this last Christmas, and I got to dig in to the full album as properly as I am currently equipped to do. My expectations were actually pretty high, on the strength of Beato’s commentary and an increasing gut feeling that this was going to be important.
Ha! Tool simply shattered those expectations, and then kept right on going.
There’s too much to say, and I’ll not even attempt to say it all now, but a couple of thoughts warrant the initial bookmark here. The best news is that at some point since I first tried, Tool’s music is now available both on streaming services and on YouTube, via their official YouTube channel. (And so now I have that Pandora station, which has further introduced me to (vocalist) Maynard’s other projects A Perfect Circle and Puscifer, which are proving to be pretty impressive in their own right!) The exposure to the whole available catalog has made several things very clear…
First, this is a group with a distinct and important muse, which highlights for me something that Robert Fripp somewhat famously said when asked if he could hear the King Crimson influence in Tool. Fripp said he couldn’t hear the influence in Tool’s music, but after listening both closely and broadly to the whole catalog, I don’t think that’s the right question to ask. I would say that I absolutely do hear, in Tool, the same ancestral voice that Fripp has discussed as available in Crimson’s influences; e.g., Bartok, Holst, Hendrix, etc. Tool’s and Crim’s muses are not the same, certainly, but I think the kinship is real, and is what sets Tool so vastly apart from anyone else who might beg a comparison.
Their history indicates pretty clearly that this is a group that does things on its own terms, and is uninterested in accepting mediocrity from itself. Man, that’s meaningful to me, and I would argue you can hear it in their work. They even appear to be getting better with time, rather than hitting a creative peak and then falling off as so often happens with big musical acts. As stunning as Lateralus is, as an album–Tool makes albums, by god, not mere collections of songs–I think their best work may be the latest one, Fear Inoculum; obviously this took some time and has some history, but again, once it arrived, it was right.
Finally, the music is rich. Crushingly rich. It is obvious that art and craft are unapologetically important to these people, and while listening you can pretty much take your pick of what to focus on. Each contributor is notably creative about his approach and execution, and can hold a listener’s interest fully–one could go on about Carey’s unique phrasing and orchestration, or Chancellor’s hypnotic riffs, or Jones’ eerie ability to imbue even the simplest palm-mute chugging with a definable personality…and then there is Keenan, with a range of nuance and emotion that is simply surprising, even to repeated listens, in its ability not just to fit within an unusual musical landscape, but actually to take that already-mature landscape to yet further places unattainable without it. And yet for all that Tool is a group; all this individual creativity serves the group’s muse first–not a simple trick to pull off!
In the most literal sense of the word, this is interesting music, which can set a hook in you without your realizing it, and then transport you instantly to places beautiful, terrible, peaceful, and chaotic.
One specific thing I find impressive about their writing is the exquisite sense of balance between the simple and the complex. In many cases, Tool’s music is not particularly complex harmonically, but is layered and rich rhythmically, and with a quality of production and palpably living tone that somehow exposes the nuance in the simple. And the music is patient, which I would argue is what makes the famous moods so intense, and also is what makes it possible to see the larger canvas on which it all fits.
Really, Tool hits firmly on pretty much all the things that the best art is capable of achieving. The craft is undeniable, the art is obvious, and the authenticity is nearly overwhelming, to those who make themselves available to it.
I suspect there’ll be more on these pages, but it’ll probably be more specific. For an initial effort, it seemed to make more sense to speak to the biggest things first.
Craftygrass 