As far as Tool goes, I can't stand it. It's fucking awful.

On the other hand, after analyzing a few key songs with some people who knew a little more about the band, I came to the conclusion that Tool might be a joke band.

If this is true, Tool is a work of true genius. That means that Tool is directly marketing to a convinced group of Nu-Metal kids and pointing out that they are all morons for liking their music. They would have also duped the music industry in that case. Funny.

I doubt that this is the case though. Tool most likely have a lot of completely retarded lyrics, that are so retarded that it could be taken as them making a joke. Still funny.

Although... Tool has given a select group of Nu-Metal morons the idea that they now have a band to be pretentious about. I'm always hearing that Tool is a group of musical "masterminds" and that I am just not musically educated enough to understand the band's genius. Now this is by far the funniest part about the band. I love being told that I don't know anything about music by a kid wearing an extra large Korn shirt laden in hemp neclaces. Ha.

The singer of this band punched me in the face and broke my glasses, so I have to give em a not crap for that alone. Their music? Who cares.
They opened for Henry Rollins when I was in high school and they were just starting, I jumped on the stage, as was pretty common in those days...before I can jump off, the singer runs up and screams 'Get off my stage you fucking stoner!' and punches me right in the face. To this day I wonder why he called me a stoner, I had short hair and was wearing a nice shirt and wasn't stoned. Funny story, later that same night Mr. Rollins choked and pretty much body slammed the other kid I was there with for doing the same thing. Ah, the good ol days.

I like this band Tool more than most bands that I like a good deal. I think what they do, they do tremendously well and rather evocatively. I also think they have progressed considerably from their early incarnation, particularly after parting with their original bassist.

Their guitarist does all their videos, which may just be a Brothers Quay homage but still work considerably well.

Their drummer teamed up with Dale Crover on the third of the Melvins "trilogy" records to deliver a few minutes of mind-bending drum attack that I defy anyone not to at least give a nod to.

Their singer, pretentious and formulaic though he may be, also has a great voice and screams better than anyone I've heard since Roger Daltrey.

Their bassist clearly does a lot of drugs. I like a good, drugged-out bassist.

If the music moves you, you understand why I like this band. If it does not, you probably think I am some nu-metal fuckball for wearing their shirts. I don't care. I vote them not crap.

For now I consider them 'not-crap', but I admit that I liked them a lot more when they seemed to be more humorous about what they did, rather than completely submerging themselves into occult/ritual magic(k) nonsense. With Lateralus I find Ticks and Leeches to be their least accomplished/most embarassing song; so whiny, they did better with "hooker with a penis".

Opiate: junk-food
Undertow: slightly more digestable
Ænima: apex
Lateralus: denouement

so funny for me to see that Opiate is so shat upon! my first introduction to Tool was in '92, by this guy who also introduced me to Melvins and Phish that same year. i thought Opiate was seriously kick ass, considering i was coming from a Met-tal background and they were doing Met-tal better than most folks at that time. Met-tal was pretty dead by '90, '91, so '92 it was like, ugh. Opiate was nice. i dug it. also, we listened to the Undertow. i liked this Undertow as well, but not nearly as much as Opiate, because it seemed to me to be more self-conscious, and more fancy-pants. but i still liked it. there was a day i sat down to see if i could learn some of the bass parts, and i came to the conclusion that there was really like one song on that album, over and over again. so maybe i liked it a little less when i found how easy it was to play along, but i still liked it. after that, they kinda went off the deep end. they went super-tech, all fancy-pants, and so artsy i wanted to puke. i didn't like them so much after that.

i still wouldn't call them crap, but i find it weird that i'm like the only person in the whole world who thinks they've gotten progressively less listenable as time goes on, instead of more. hrm!!

clearly not crap...like, obviously the occult-esque stuff on their website and artwork is at least half tongue in cheek, and if you can't get past that, then you're missing the whole point of the band. no one can say they're bad players...you might not dig the tunes and whatever, but it's skilled playing if nothing else. i happen to think that they're cool songwriters too...obviously they operate in a very small range in the musical spectrum, but they do what they do rather well. more than one band has tried to emulate it. and to say that they're just as formulaic as nickelback is going a little far. i mean, i see what you're getting at, and i agree to a point, but to compare them with those jokers just shows a lack of respect for what tool has accomplished. and yes, lots of meathead idiots like them, but that just means they're getting their point across. if you're doing metal and meatheads don't like it, then you're doing it wrong. like, if it only appealed to geeks on messageboards, then it wouldn't really be that dangerous or influential, would it. in other words, they'd be slint, and it would be musically semi-interesting, but ultimately uninspiring. art for art's sake only gets you so far, and tool knows this. they're not geniuses, but they play well, and they play loud, and know how to affect people. and reaching people is what it's all about, right?

dan wrote:As far as Tool goes, I can't stand it. It's fucking awful.

On the other hand, after analyzing a few key songs with some people who knew a little more about the band, I came to the conclusion that Tool might be a joke band.

If this is true, Tool is a work of true genius.

There is an element of truth in this.

I was briefly rehearsing with a band that toured with Tool four years ago and from the stories that they told there is very much a underlying attitude amongst Tool that it is all a bit of a joke. All of the so-called occult-experimental mathematics-imagery etc. is a total con. In fact the whole image that the band convey seems totally contrived.

All the info I got was second-hand but it all seemed to sound about right. The current bassplayer is a English guy that was in a stoner-rock band called Peach. After putting two-and-two together Tool seems like that end result of some prog-metal-hippies not far shy of still wearing purple tie-dyed Lep Zep t-shirts and a great marketing dept.

As far as my opinion of the music, Aenima is a fun record. Lateralus sounds a bit overly ernest and samey, the rest are dated and a bit boring

tool had a huge impact on me as a teenager (not terribly long ago). i haven't listened to it in a while, but:

drummer: plays exciting, chopsy stuff in a way that works really well -- probably because the songs are practically written around his playing.

guitarist: riffs are kinda dumb. but i mean this board is all about melvins, right? they play some dumb riffs, eh? guy can't play a guitar solo but can make fun squiggly noises that function as a "solo"

bassist: gets better with each album, by "lateralus" plays a bigger role than the guitarist

vocalist: great voice. knows it maybe a little too much leading into certain divaisms, particularly with "a perfect circle"

lyrics: definitely good moments, but once overly fixated on anal sex, then overly fixated on hippy new age mumbo jumbo.

not crap.

In context of mainstream heavy nu soft and watery shit spraying from

anus of music industry, is Tool definite above an average.

But without regard to rest of MTV-big company radio situation which tryes to push this kind of band into our assholes, TOOL must be considered as crap.

Maybe are good band for MTV shit, even when Tool and so much of their fans really go on my nerves.

Still are crap.

I'd have to agree... Tool, Radiohead, et al. are provocative only if you look at them in terms of their market... For MTV bands that play on late night talk shows and SNL, they're creative... Compared to music marginalized-for-it's-brilliance, they're not that good...

I remember seeing Radiohead play that really bad song from Kid A on SNL. It's such a bad song. Same drum hip hop beat through the whole song. Yet, it's the one they chose to play. For all their weak artistic inclination, they play the lamest, blandest tune on that overrated album!

I don't even think for their market, they're that innovative. I'd take Incubus or Korn over those guys any day...

And if you look at what Shudder to Think was able to pull off on a major label, well, it puts Tool and Radiohead to shame...

To pre-empt... I bring up Radiohead because the Chimp did...