![]() I’ll admit, after hearing “Jambi” a few times I woke up humming the sound of an old man trying to start up a recalcitrant 1962 Ford Falcon Club Wagon on an icy winter day. Sure, getting a good song stuck in your head is fun and humming a tune is a nice sometimes, and thank heavens we have Maynard around to test out some semi-melodic little vocal figures over the bubbling squall of bass shit, but the real future of music lies in the total death of melody. I may mention the general tunelessness of recent Tool songs, but I’ve already predicted the result: “Yeah, ‘Doctor’ Thorpe, you try coming up with a tune in a song written in 6.35/12/3 time! Tool is too complicated for tunes!” Yes, what a plebeian I am, shackled to the concept of melody, unwilling to see the genius of Tool’s usage of lofty concepts such as lengthy meandering and endless shuffling guitar scratchings. His ass is frequently saved by the workmanlike bass twiddling of What’s-His-Face, who charitably wrests the lead from Jones when the going gets too tough. ![]() Yes, that’s about the best that could be said of him: someone somewhere might have some kind of argument in his favor. Both are drummers, you know) inscrutable poly-molly-wooly-rhythms and tiresome bass drum wank-rolls that sound like a finger stuck in a fan (but, somehow, it’s music!).Īs always, the affair is shabbily held together by the guitar work of Adam Jones, which manages to touch all the extremes of mediocrity, from the chilling abyss of conspicuous sub-mediocrity (the spit-soaked Frampton-Comes-Alive solo on “Jambi”) to the thrilling stratosphere of… defensibility. We’ve got Danny Carey’s (or is it Dana Carvey? I always mix those two up. Only in “The Pot” does he break out of his well-trod habits and surprise/embarrass us with some little-brotherly falsetto mewling. We’ve got Maynard’s trademarked wacky frontloaded cadence that makes him sound like he’s gasping out words between pauses in getting beaten up (vi oomph cari oomph ous oomph ly oomph I…). They might as well have not have released it at all, because anyone who’s ever heard Tool could simply imagine what a new Tool album would sound like, and this is exactly what they’d imagine. KeenanWhat can I say about 10,000 Days, really? It sounds exactly and precisely like a Tool album. But lo, I must comment, for it is my job.įamed singer/beatnik Maynard G. More importantly, I don’t think this world needs any more Tool-related discourse, since message board discussion of the hidden meaning of every last nugget of cryptic poesy and superfluous plopping noise currently accounts for 75% of the Internet’s traffic. I’m not sure I can stomach the prospect of picking over a whole Tool album today, or ever. I know that if were to I let this Tool album slip by without telling my soft-headed readers why they shouldn’t be listening to it, half of them would buy it and let it corrupt their delicate brains, and the slightly smarter half would crucify me for failing in my solemn duty to protect humanity from smarty-pants prog-metal. Once upon a time, I lived for the simple pleasure of not having to listen to Tool albums. The number of days it will take me to wade through the e-mails calling me a prick for making fun of Maynard’s mom having a stroke. It’s not funny, Maynard’s mom had a STROKE and she was PARALYZED for 10,000 Days, you prick! The average age at which a male Tool fan loses his virginity, if manual stimulation by a 15-year-old girl in the back of a movie theater showing Saw II counts. "Fool"?-The combined man-hours involved in designing the album’s packaging. And now, here it is: 10,000 Days, which could refer to just about anything. The worst part, though, is that it set a precedent whenever some high-profile nerd-rock album comes out, people expect me to listen to it.Īs soon as there were grim whispers that a new Tool album was impending, I started to get all sorts of e-mails demanding that I write a review of it. The post-traumatic shockwaves of extended noise passages and cockeyed guitar solos and songs called “Snyrf the Volpen Piss’t” are still ringing in my ears. In case you missed it, I made the mistake of listening to the damn thing. I really shot myself in the foot with last year’s Mars Volta album review.
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