Released in between Aenima and Lateralus, Salival is Tool’s only live album to date. Note: the argument can be made (usually by me, to everyone) that Tool has yet to make a bad album, so the following is a ranking of their least perfect to most perfect albums. Below, I rank their five studio albums, one EP and one live album. He along with singer Maynard James Keenan, guitarist Adam Jones and drummer Danny Carey have consistently toured and very inconsistently released albums for 29 years. Not only did their music survive the '90s, they as a band stayed together undergoing just one lineup change, swapping bassist Paul D’Amour for Justin Chancellor. It’s 2019 and Tool is still among the greats. Time is art’s greatest and most impartial critic. I was an angsty, unpopular teenager in the '90s, so artists like Tool made me feel less emotionally and physically alone. Most songs on my local radio station (I’m 900 years old) were short, had definitive verses and hooks and didn’t make me question my spiritual place in the universe. The opening sample from a Bill Hicks monologue was a typically mischievous and revealing touch, too.The first time I heard Tool I knew something was different. A towering, exploratory and fervently lysergic journey through oppressive, squalling progressive metal nightmares, Third Eye is terrifying and irresistible in equal measure. If Tool fans’ jaws weren’t already on the floor by the time their first reached the end of Aenima, the album’s closing track will have ensured that no mind was left unboggled. The underlying rage in Maynard Keenan’s stunning vocal performance is startling enough, but the song’s many crescendos and pay-offs are simultaneously mesmerising and devastating. Quite possibly the finest song Tool have ever recorded, the title track from their second album daydreams blearily about California floating off into the Pacific (or Arizona Bay, if you prefer) and all those soulless LA bellshiners suddenly finding they need to swim for their lives. Prog was still a fairly dirty word when Lateralus was released, but the positive fightback started right here. Perhaps the most beautiful song in Tool’s small but magnificent catalogue, Schism begins with a quintessentially Tool-esque, twinkling, fluid bass riff and then continues through heart-rending, ethereal textures and moments of precise but untamed bombast, Maynard’s melodies erupting from the melee like cautionary tales from a benevolent cosmos. There are so many brilliant ideas crammed into The Grudge that it almost seems more than just a song: the interplay between guitarist Adam Jones, drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor is simply magical, and Maynard’s commanding proclamations make the whole thing sound like a furious message from the prog rock gods. Masters of the jaw-dropping album opener, Tool cemented their reputation as one of heavy music’s most aggressively creative forces with this nine-minute kick-start to third album Lateralus. 10,000 Days may not be most people’s favourite album, but its finest moments are as exhilarating as anything in the band’s illustrious canon and Vicarious is a gleaming gem.
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Not that anyone sensible cares, of course, but it’s worth noting that even the notoriously tone-deaf Grammy organisers noticed how reliably mind-blowing Tool’s music had become over the years. 5) Vicarious (10,000 Days, 2006)Īnother sublime opening track from what proved to be the final Tool album for OVER A DECADE, Vicarious was nominated for a Grammy. It’s not entirely clear who Maynard is railing against, but by Christ, he sounds fucking livid. It’s also a glorious showcase for Danny Carey’s extraordinary percussive skills his incisive, lolloping grooves underpin the miasmic scree of Adam Jones’ riffs with pinpoint accuracy and several fucktons of intuitive swing. Vicious, muscular and (predictably) brimming with inspirational moments, Ticks & Leeches is Tool at their heaviest and most venomous. Still a live favourite today – when Tool intermittently manage to drag themselves from the sofa – it’s an immaculate synopsis of what made this band great in the first place. Forty Six & 2 remains one of the latter album’s most spine-tingling and dynamic tunes with its hypnotic bass intro and slow burning gait, it still sounds like metal re-imagined by ancient, alien observers.
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The expansion of Tool’s sound between Undertow and its stratospheric follow-up Aenima was breathtaking to behold.