Tool – A Brief History in Ten Songs
Halley’s comet is a chunk of cosmic ice and dust which tracks a celestial loop through the galaxy and whose trajectory brings it close to earth every 75 years or so (its next flypast of earth is due in 2061). On a more manageable terrestrial timescale, Tool albums are relatively more frequent, although it may not always feel like it. 2019’s Fear Inoculum album came after a 13 year gap, and if you missed this year’s tour you may be forgiven for feeling a little apprehensive about your chances of seeing them play live again. Under the circumstances, better to savour what is available to us from this formidable band – to date, five studio albums, a mind-expanding, enigmatic presence and a collection of some of the most imaginative videos in the whole of music.
1. Opiate (1992)
Tool formed in Los Angeles in 1990, with vocalist Maynard James Keenan, guitarist Adam Jones, bassist Paul D’Amour and completed with the recruitment of the towering drummer from a neighbouring rehearsal space, Danny Carey. Friends and contemporaries of Rage Machine, they shared a similar instinct to take classic rock influences down the more interesting tributaries opened by the grunge boom. Keenan was a singer rather than a screamer, with a weird, brooding energy, Jones had a day job sculpting models at the renowned Stan Winston special effects studio, and his visual gift would become a crucial part of the band’s DNA. D’Amour provided the solid, anchoring bass while Carey was a drum superstar waiting to be recognised.
It would be reasonable to expect a band this complex to have demonstrated some impressive evolution over the years but go back to the band’s debut mini-album Opiate in 1992, and most of the building blocks are already in place – a spiky post-grunge musical template elevated by Carey’s drumming, Keenan’s lyrics had a punkish directness that would soon flower into more ambiguous directions. The title track demonstrated most of what would become the Tool signatures, to the extent that it was rerecorded without much adornment and reappeared in the 2020 setlist, fitting in seamlessly alongside the newer material.
2. Sober (1993)
Tool’s first full album Undertow presented the sound, and look, of a band finding their shape and direction very early on. While it’s their overtly rock album, it nevertheless has an unmistakable feel to it, from the enigmatic front cover art – a stylised ribcage sculpture lit a moody red, no text – to the shifting rhythms of the title track and the mounting power of Flood, and outright strangeness of the 15 minute closer Disgustipated.
It was a triumph, with a chunk of its success coming from the accompanying videos for Sober and Prison Sex, each of which featured no s]footage of the band in favour of Adam Jones’ model making and animation, inspired by the disturbing stop motion skills of Czech legend Jan Svankmajer and American identical twin filmmakers Brothers Quay. These videos would quickly come to look primitive compared to what would shortly follow, but a key layer of the Tool mystique had been firmly established.
3. Stinkfist (1996)
Their next album, Aenima, brought the sole line-up change of Tool’s career, with the departure of Paul D’Amour exasperated at the band’s meticulous, obsessive approach to songwriting. English bassist Justin Chancellor was recruited from their occasional opening act Peach, and in the process cemented the weird chemistry of the band. Producer David Bottrill was recruited due to his previous work with King Crimson and David Sylvian, evidence of the band’s desire to move away from Rock norms.
The album artwork took a further step into the ambitious visual Tool identity, featuring a lenticular design which moved as the viewer did.
Meanwhile the video for the opening track Stinkfist boasted a huge leap in production values from the Undertow videos, resembling a home movie projected direct from the unsettling nightmares of David Lynch. Strange, eyeless humanoid figures stumble around a decaying laboratory, ingesting rusty nails and slowly gaining humanity. Whether it signified hope or some sort of Hell was unclear.
While band members were absent from the video and album artwork, they would take part in the occasional promotional interview, although they tended to be a little awkward and mildly obstructive, plainly seeing the music and videos as all any reasonable person would need to know about them. Maynard Keenan, in particular awkward with the conventional notion of a ‘frontman’, took advantage of the increasing size of stages they were playing to retreat to a low platform next the drumkit (admittedly while wearing a series of increasingly odd costumes), leaving front stage to Jones and Chancellor, who rarely moved a great deal anyway.
Inevitably this led to the growth of the image of them as secretive occult philosophers, a view they were apparently, perhaps with playful mischief, happy to let go uncontradicted.
4. Ticks and Leeches (2001)
Reasons for the increasingly lengthy delays between albums have been many and varied – a slow working process, inter-band tensions, family commitments, side projects – but it’s also notable that Tool have been unfortunate to suffer a series of legal delays. New album Lateralus was held back while disputes with former record companies and managers absorbed a lot of time which would otherwise have been used more creatively. On their resolution, Lateralus was finally released in 2001, and nestled darkly among its more prominent psychedelic metal offering was the blunt Ticks and Leeches, which channelled much of the angry frustration of the previous years. “Is this what you wanted? Well this is what you’re getting. I hope you choke” raged Maynard at the song’s conclusion. While you couldn’t help but sympathise with the band’s plight, there lurked a guilty acknowledgement that it had nevertheless provoked a great song.
5. Parabola (2001)
Tool embraced their warrior mage reputation with this mind-expanding Lateralus, a Latin word meaning ‘sounds cool and looks good on a t-shirt’ (maybe), in which the band found another significant member of their creative team, psychedelic artist Alex Grey. Grey’s work depicted an optimistic world of revelation and evolution, with the human form revealed in multiple dimensions – a concept ambitiously displayed in the layers of transparent album artwork contained within the CD. The video for Parabola featured Bristolian rapper Tricky as a kind of mutant humanoid seeking and finding fiery enlightenment in a dark fairy tale forest.
Tool’s ascent to stadium filling throwback to the heyday of 70s rock giants was complete – they had refined and updated the majestic power of Led Zeppelin, the musical and lyrical ambition of Rush, the otherworldly scale of Pink Floyd. For the accompanying US tour the band selected King Crimson as the opening act, an act of homage to Robert Fripp’s prog metal experimental founding fathers.
- Schism (2001)
The pattern for lengthy waits between records was now set, and in the intervening time since finishing touring Aenima, Keenan had put out an album with Tool guitar tech Billy Howerdel under the name of A Perfect Circle in 2000, which promptly went straight into the US top ten and went on to sell over a million copies, causing a certain amount of friction among the Tool camp. Schism addressed the inter-band tensions unflinchingly. “I know the pieces fit, because I watched them tumble down”
Still, like the sand in the oyster producing a pearl, it was a productive friction. And another amazing video. But by now we expected that.
- Rosetta Stoned (2006)
After a mere five year wait, the fourth Tool album was 10,000 Days, named after the amount of time Maynard’s mother endured her final illness. The CD was a characteristically ambitious Tool artefact, which unfolded to reveal a pair of lenses built in which assembled, Transformer-like, into a 3-D viewer with which to immerse yourself in a booklet of band photos and Alex Grey illustrations.
The continuing absence of personal information from the band, together, albeit unwillingly – with the long periods between records, added to the collective Tool mystique, and 10,000 Days added to the aura.
However, one of the album’s epic centrepieces, Rosetta Stoned, gleefully pulled at this esoteric public image, telling the story of a man who receives cosmic enlightenment while in a hospital bed, only to misplace his pen and then forget the message.
“Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position / Such a heavy burden now, to be The One / Born to bear and bring to all the details of our ending / To write it down for all the world to see / But I forgot my pen / Shit the bed again. Typical”
To create and simultaneously collapse a personal mythology was quite a trick, but one they pulled off with aplomb. After all, they had done this before, on Aenima’s weird militaristic Die Eier Von Satan, a menacing industrial march with a voice barking out lyrics in German while crowds roar in the background. It inevitably conjures images of a 1930s Nazi rally until it was pointed out that the translation revealed the instructions for boiling an egg.
- Vicarious (2006)
Inside 10,000 Days, the music matched the package’s ambition, sounding more powerful than ever thanks to new producer Joe Barresi.
The album’s opening track was a thunderous display of power and technique, one of their heaviest songs to date, proof that for all the talk of Fibonacci Sequences and sacred geometry they were still a fearsome rock band.
It also inspired their most striking and ambitious video to date – another variation on theme of evolution and enlightenment, framed in another discombobulating alien landscape.
- Pneuma (2019)
Three hundred metres below the ground in Naica in Mexico there is a 100 metre long cave in which the largest crystals known to man – the largest over 11 metres long – were discovered in 2000. A thousand-year process of slow crystallisation has resulted in perfect geometric formations of hypnotic awe and beauty. Above the ground, on a more modern mortal timescale, Tool had taken one of their periodic retreats, during which what would eventually become Fear Inoculum slowly took shape. The by-now familiar tales of inter-band frictions and difficulties were now expanded to include another court case, Maynard forming another successful side project (Puscifer), and the two-year global Covid hiatus, but the album duly arrived – mostly via online streaming, embraced for the first time along with their back catalogue. A limited edition and very expensive CD package was the only physical release.
It is an album which reveals its greatness gradually – first play struck many as relatively underwhelming Tool by numbers – but the more attention you gave it, the more compelling it became. Maynard’s voice is more composed, ever more mindful of advancing age robbing the raw power of old, but it fitted the reflective mood.
The heaviest song, Tempest, starts with an intricate interweaving of bass and guitar which owes a hefty nod to King Crimson’s Frame By Frame, before launching into an extended guitar workout. Adam Jones didn’t possess a reputation for show-off guitar solos but makes up for it here.
However, despite each member attaining personal high points in service of the whole, it’s impossible to avoid the startling brilliance of Danny Carey, who utilises every item of his extensive kit – gong, tabla pads, the works – in the unashamed manner of the master craftsman he has undoubtedly become. The drumcam Youtube video for elegant, polyrhythmic Pneuma is a masterclass of power and subtlety
10. Invincible (2019)
The stage shows, for those lucky enough to catch the tour were immersive sonic and visual spectaculars of the highest order, opening up an almost literal new dimension for the band to operate in.
Where would the band go next? Carey in particular has expressed a desire to follow up the album with un-Tool-like haste, perhaps aware of the advancing predations of time. But then again, he’s said that before, and Tool only moves at its own pace. Invincible, one of the album stand out songs, faces the predicament of the ageing rock musician head on: “Beating tired bones / Tripping through ‘remember when’ / Once invincible /
