New York Times Review of Tool 5/19/06

I realize this is rather late to post this but as you may or may not know I saw Tool on 5/19/06 and the show was fantastic. I posted my review two posts down but while searching the Tool forums today I saw a pretty interesting review by the New York Times on the show. For those who are interested it is a good read.

New York Times / May 22, 2006 / By John Pareles

Here's an unanswerable question: Would Tool have become what it is today — a band that fills arenas and has its albums zoom instantly to No. 1 — with a different name?

That one-syllable name, with its proud phallic connotations and an "ooh" sound made to be bellowed from the bleachers, promises the brute power of heavy metal. The band draws a black-shirted, testosterone-soaked crowd, one so formidable that when Tool started its two nights at City Center on Friday, arriving audience members faced a head-to-foot pat-down. Yet while Tool's music is loud and aggressive, it's never simple-minded.

Tool's songs are tricky mathematical inventions. They're propelled by plucked guitar patterns in odd meters that defy foot-tapping. Adam Jones's guitar, Justin Chancellor's bass and Danny Carey's drums often mesh in a three-part counterpoint recalling King Crimson.

Maynard James Keenan's voice is not a metal growl but a mournful, almost androgynous croon, bearing smooth melodies aloft over the band's pointillism. The songs pelt listeners with notes until they heave toward a payoff: brawny power chords, a thrashing riff and a gloomily triumphant refrain.

Tool has a long attention span; seven minutes is brief for a Tool composition. At City Center songs began with long, deliberate stretches of ambient sound: eerie electronic tinklings or sustained guitar tones before the first pattern appeared, usually to a roar of recognition.

Although Tool has been off the road for three years — the reason it has been playing theater-size shows as a warm-up for an arena tour — it hasn't changed its staging much. As usual Mr. Keenan stood on a platform near the back of the stage without a spotlight on him, although he could be seen striking poses or pulling off his cowboy hat to show the tall Mohawk haircut underneath.

Video screens behind the band were synched to the split second for each song, showing abstract patterns and bald creatures — human and alien, live and animated — doing obscurely creepy things involving slime and viscera. But the real show was in the musicianship: the interlocked parts, the snowballing dynamics, the way each episode of a song only contributed to its suspense.

The set reached back as far as "Sober" from Tool's 1993 album "Undertow"; it sounded like a simple grunge tune compared with Tool's more recent progressive-rock epics. In songs from the band's new album, "10,000 Days" (Volcano/Zomba/Sony BMG), Mr. Keenan sang about tabloid thrills in "Vicarious" ("I need to watch things die from a distance"), an alien abduction or drug trip or both in "Rosetta Stoned," the evolutionary absurdity of war in "Right in Two" ("monkey killing monkey killing monkey"), and a virtuous declaration of love — for a companion or a savior — in "Jambi." But the power of the songs is in their tone and in the way the music winds tighter and tighter before it explodes. What comes through is sinewy, virtuosic finesse: taking pleasure in construction, not destruction.