Jun
23
2009
Tool – Lateralus (2001)
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Tool
Most heavy metal bands write songs and albums that are best experienced from inside the mosh pit whilst jumping about and throwing other concert-goers into each other. Tool are an exception. Tool’s music is best experienced from a reclined and relaxed position in a nice comfy chair, with your eyes closed, either through good headphones or good stereo loudspeakers.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m certainly not saying Tool aren’t a good live band, in fact in the 3 times I’ve seen them, their music has sounded every bit as much at home through the walls of amplifiers and speakers typical of the genre as that of their peers, however fidelity is the differentiator, and while Tool’s live performances have all the energy you would expect of a modern metal band, they also have a real feel for organic dynamics akin to a pinkfloydesque sense of refrain. And this certainly isn’t the only similarity that Tool have to the legendary prog rockers.
Blasphemy? How can one compare a METAL band with legends like Pink Floyd? Surely the author of this article is some deluded teenager with a Tool complex?
Well, the quick answer is that the band make it very easy. Their musical ability, artistic integrity, philosophical and experimental extra-curricular tendencies and clear understanding of classical and post-classical composition methods all shine through the “heavy metal” facade, on their studio albums and in live situations alike.
Their use of compound time signatures goes way beyond the quirkyness usually associated with metal bands that occasionally stray from 4/4, and in fact with Tool, you get the feeling that the band have managed to completely cast aside “the shackles of the four” and have ascended to a higher musical plane of existence where all time signatures are equal in relevance and any portions of the music that resemble a more traditional contemporary rhythm are purely coincidental.
But the timing within the music isn’t the only difference between Tool and their more traditional heavy metal peers. Their use of their instruments to produce new and interesting sounds gives the impression that Tool are the Madagascar of the genre – cut off from their neighbours for millennia by continental drift, their music evolving separately from that of their peers into unique new species of songs, sounds and techniques, the likes of which you just don’t hear anywhere else.
Somehow, using the same instruments and amplifiers as everyone else, they manage to create new and interesting sounds and soundscapes that can deceive an uninformed listener into thinking they’re listening to a different instrument entirely – bass parts that sound like they could be guitar, guitar parts that sound like they’re a synth, drum parts that sound like they’re being played by 3 or 4 drummers rather than one, and perhaps most profoundly, vocals which are used as an instrument, equal to all of the others, as opposed to the music being a backing for a central vocal theme, like we are generally used to hearing in popular contemporary music.
Lateralus, Tool’s third studio album (of four so far, although we are told they are to start working on a fifth in 2009) has, in my opinion, been Tool’s pinnacle work to date.
On their debut album, Undertow (1993), Tool were still finding their feet. There were stirrings of a difference to their peers, although the songs more closely resembled “song format” than the progressive nature of their later works.
With their follow-up album, Aenima (1996), The metamorphosis was in full flow. Instead of a collection of songs, Tool had produced an album – a real album – a progressive piece of work that took the listener on a journey from beginning to end. The guitar work, courtesy of Adam Jones, was moving away from traditional metal powerchords into more artistic terrain, new bassist Justin Chancellor added a more organic feel to the bottom end that moved it away from the traditional role of “part of the rhythm section” into a more jazz-mentality role of “key instrument”, and these changes allowed drummer Danny Carey and vocalist Maynard James Keenan the space to really come to life.
With Lateralus, Tool had had five years to write the album due to a legal dispute with former label Volcano Records, and in this time they built upon the foundation they had laid with Aenima and created a 78 minutes and 58 seconds masterpiece of an album.
Drummer Danny Carey said, “The manufacturer would only guarantee us up to 79 minutes… We thought we’d give them two seconds of breathing room.”Carey aspired to create longer songs like those by artists he grew up listening to. The band had segues to place between songs, as with Aenima, but had to cut out a lot during the mastering phase to fit the 79 minute barrier.
The album was released on May 15, 2001, and debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 chart.
On August 5, 2003, Lateralus was certified double platinum by the RIAA.
It was named the Kerrang! Album Of The Year in 2001, and the band received the 2002 Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance for the song “Schism”.
The song “Ticks & Leeches” was ranked #1 on Digital Dream Door’s 100 Greatest Rock Drum Performances.
With their follow up to Lateralus, 10000 Days (2006), Tool once again composed an outstanding album, but one where the youthful raw happy-go-lucky passion and energy of Lateralus was accompanied, probably unsurprisingly, by a numbness and melancholy. I say “probably unsurprisingly” because the title of the album, 10000 Days, is an approximate reference to the amount of time that elapsed between Maynard’s mother having a stroke which left her paralysed, and her death, shortly after the Lateralus tour.
Composition And Content (from Wikipedia)
Drummer Danny Carey sampled himself breathing through a tube to simulate the chanting of Buddhist monks for “Parabol”, and banged piano strings for samples on “Reflection”. “Faaip de Oiad” samples a recording of a 1997 call on Art Bell’s radio program Coast to Coast AM. “Faaip de Oiad” is Enochian for The Voice Of God.
“Disposition”, “Reflection”, and “Triad” form a sequence that has been performed in succession live with occasional help from various tourmates such as Mike Patton, Buzz Osborne, Tricky, and members of Isis, Meshuggah, and King Crimson.
The title track, “Lateralus,” incorporates the Fibonacci Sequence. For example, the syllables of the lyrics follow the Fibonacci pattern, and the time signature of the chorus rotates between 9/8, 8/8, and 7/8 time, referring to the 17th Fibonacci number, 987. The theme of the song describes the desire of humans to explore and to expand for more knowledge and a deeper understanding of everything. The lyric “spiral out,” which is sung repeatedly throughout the song, refers to this desire and also to the Fibonacci Spiral, which is formed by creating and arranging rectangles for each number in the sequence’s 1,1,2,3,5,8,… pattern, and drawing a curve that connects to two corners of each rectangle. This forms a never-ending and infinitely-expanding spiral.
“Eon Blue Apocalypse” is about Adam Jones’ Great Dane named Eon Blue, who had died from bone cancer, while “The Grudge” references the classic novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The track “Mantra” is the slowed-down sound of Maynard James Keenan gently squeezing one of his cats.
Cover Art
The insert is translucent and flips open to reveal the different layers of the human body. Disguised in the brain matter on the final layer is the word “God.” The artwork was done by artist Alex Grey, who also designed the 3-D cover for 10000 Days.
Track Listing
“The Grudge” – 8:36
“Eon Blue Apocalypse” – 1:04
“The Patient” – 7:13
“Mantra” – 1:12
“Schism” – 6:47
“Parabol” – 3:04
“Parabola” – 6:03
“Ticks & Leeches” – 8:10
“Lateralus” – 9:24
“Disposition” – 4:46
“Reflection” – 11:07
“Triad” – 8:46
“Faaip de Oiad” – 2:39
Just as Salival was initially released with several errors on the track listing, early pressings of Lateralus had the ninth track incorrectly spelled as “Lateralis”. The original title of “Reflection” was “Resolution” before being changed at the last minute.
Rolling Stone gave the following review:
You need time to deal with Lateralus – a lot more than the seventy-seven minutes it takes just to play the whole disc. And for much of that time, you will wonder: What the fuck is going on here? Drums, bass and guitars move in jarring cycles of hyperhowl and near-silent death march. The mix is inside out – roiling percussion and grunting bass to the fore; the singer bellowing from the far back of the band’s black roar. And where is the melodic and narrative resolution in this crushing darkness? Do these asymmetrical chunks of distemper – one-minute sound games, jumbo two- and three-part suites – even qualify as songs?
So much of Tool’s third full-length studio album – five years in the waiting, due in part to extended legal turbulence – makes so little sense at first. But that is one of Lateralus’ most endearing qualities: It rolls out its pleasures and coherence slowly, even stubbornly. Most of the so-called new metal has the dramatic heft of thin air. But the L.A.-based Tool – guitarist Adam Jones, vocalist Maynard James Keenan (back from his other band, A Perfect Circle), drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor – are obsessed with weight, the cumulative force of muscle, imagination and immaculately wrought suspense. Tool have everything it takes to beat you senseless; they proved it on 1993’s Undertow and their 1996 Grammy-winning beast, Aenima. Here, Tool go to extravagant lengths to drown you in sensation.
The prolonged running times of most of Lateralus’ thirteen tracks are misleading; the entire album rolls and stomps with suitelike purpose. In “The Grudge” (8:34), “Schism” (6:43) and “Lateralus” (9:22), the episodic swerves are compressed under single titles. Other numbers run together like connective tissue. “Parabol” and “Parabola” are basically distorted reflections of each other, twinned images of the same nightmare. In “Parabol,” Keenan’s voice is bathed in wet, gray echo and crawls like a wounded man through the implied devastation of Carey’s hissing cymbals and Chancellor’s gaunt bass lines. “Parabola” is the emotional remix, an explosive rescoring of that agony with the additional payoff of hard-won deliverance. Carey goes into jungle-telegraph overdrive, and Jones’ guitar is a colossus of distortion; his break just past the midway point is so broad and dense with fuzz that it doesn’t seem to have any notes – or air. You could die of suffocation in there.
“Ticks and Leeches” needs every one of its eight minutes to reach its bloody apogee. The song is an opera of nervous tics: the vicious chop of the central hook; a sudden drop into virtual nothing; the cleaving effect of Keenan’s charred screaming; a final triple-time freakout. Some sections stop on a dime, in mid-rage; the quiet bit is a serious test of patience, a long veil of faint strum and smothering peril. But each of those changes is a potent, necessary link in a snowballing indictment of parasitic evil. When Keenan goes into his climactic seizure (“Suuuck! Meee! Dryyy!”), he sounds like he’s truly up to his neck in harpies and lawyers.
In another era, Lateralus – co-produced by Tool and engineer David Bottrill – would have been considered progressive rock, ten tons of impressive pretension. Jones’ hairpin riffing in “The Grudge,” the cool, dreamy intro of “The Patient” and Carey’s frenetic Afro-Zeppelin drumming all over the record suggest a grand mutant blend of vintage Jane’s Addiction and King Crimson circa Larks’ Tongues in Aspic. The only things separating Pink Floyd’s spacewalk “Echoes” – which ate up Side Two of 1971’s Meddle – and the twenty-two-minute sequence of “Disposition,” “Reflection” and “Triad” on Lateralus are thirty years and Tool’s impulse to cram every inch of infinity with hard guitar meat and absolute dread.
But in this heavy-music century, awash in masks, turntables and Ming the Merciless goatees, Lateralus stands for a vanishing common sense in hard rock: that the only extremes that matter are those in the music. Indeed, the most amazing thing about Lateralus is Tool’s extraordinary restraint. One reason why these songs seem to go on forever is that the band never rushes a good idea: the soft, protracted tension of “Disposition”; the Arabic-metal jamming in “Triad.”
But the reason you don’t keep checking your watch is because Tool never play like they’re just killing time. “I know/The pieces fit,” Keenan swears repeatedly against the rolling thunder of “Schism.” Lateralus is a monster of many parts, made to be swallowed whole.
The Real Music Forum loves Tool – Lateralus (2001). A true masterpiece of an album. We hope you do too.
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