When I was 28, I’d regressed emotionally and gone back to “Swamp Song,” having failed to give 2006’s extra-knotty 10,000 Days its due beyond the requisite lame jokes about 10,000 hours being how long it took to listen to it. 1 on the Billboard album chart and snuck the windy and unnervingly lovely single “Schism” onto what was left of alt-rock radio despite the song’s Wikipedia page having a whole hilariously nightmarish subheading for Time Signature. My favorite Tool song when I was 23 was “ The Grudge,” the screamy opening track to 2001’s knotty Lateralus, which got hella sassed by Pitchfork but nonetheless debuted at no. As pure indulgent prog-metal goes, they’ve never topped it, or at least never balanced the prog and the metal so perfectly. A quintessential philosopher-bro jam from the Bill Hicks sample on down, it is gloriously pretentious and shockingly rad, with an eerie seven-beat refrain- pry-ing op-en my third eye-that knocks you flat as both a muted kick-drum heartbeat and a throat-shredding, Ozzfest-ravaging roar. My favorite Tool song when I was 18 was “Third Eye,” the terrifyingly bonkers 14-minute closer of their much-beloved 1996 album Ænima. Don’t worry so much about digesting it and just let it digest you.
It is, in Tool’s long-dissected but still somehow inimitable way, a graceful and warm and welcoming beast. It rewards your close attention but will tolerate your inevitable post-millennial distraction. But as an immersive, overwhelming experience, it’s a very pleasing combo of pummeling black-hole density and vaporous New Dark Age atmosphere. I’m not going to sit here and pretend that I have fully or even partially absorbed Fear Inoculum yet, an impossible task at this hour no matter how many Labor Day weekend cookouts you might’ve chosen to terrorize with it. And now? Let’s just say that Tool’s long-long-long-long-awaited new album, Fear Inoculum, is 10 tracks and a belligerent fuckin’ 86 minutes long, each Homeric epic of a song a swamp-themed planet unto itself, a 50-billion-ton labyrinth that sprawls out in every direction for light years, the Fuck No to Yes’s Yes. “Swamp Song” was an Undertow deep cut, but deep cuts were where the grodiest, heaviest action was: Even before the band (Jones, enigmatic singer Maynard James Keenan, 1995-and-beyond bassist Justin Chancellor, and drummer Danny Carey) fully turned toward atmospheric steakhead prog rock, this bog was thick and easy to get lost in. (“That dude’s, like, saying, ‘Dammit, quit messing with my head and go get my legs,’” Butt-head observes, at least attempting a thoughtful interpretation of the video.) Immediately, you-at-15 were invited to take these guys either 0 or 200 percent seriously, with little middle ground, though even at 0 percent you could still marvel at the sheer perverse audacity of following up “Sober” with another pulverizing gross claymation-video hit called, yes, “Prison Sex,” whose lyrics I thought about quoting here but never mind.
(“If I could move my arm that fast,” Butt-Head observes, “I’d never leave the house.”) egghead metalhead degenerates who somehow got the gross claymation video for their breakout hit, the pulverizing dirge “Sober,” in front of MTV’s two dumbass princes Beavis and Butt-Head, who dug it very much (“Yeah yeah! Cool! Yeah!”) but did not perhaps treat the macabre stop-motion visuals, crafted in part by Tool guitarist Adam Jones, with the proper reverence. In 1993, armed with their debut full-length Undertow, Tool were the heaviest, scariest, grodiest band on alt-rock radio, L.A. ’Cause you’re a dumbass belligerent fucker ’Cause you’re a stupid belligerent fucker This bog is thick and easy to get lost in You guessed it: all the swearing in the chorus.
Mine was “Swamp Song.” See if you can guess why.
Real quick, in honor of Friday’s release of their first new album in 13 years, let’s everybody say what your favorite Tool song was when you were 15.
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