Tool

[Adam]

I listened to 10,000 Days twice today while at work. The first time, I had to deal with crowd noise. But headphones really make all the difference, and the second time around, I heard a lot more detail, especially on the instrumental tracks.
I'm enjoying it, just letting the album work me over.

[Adam]

thorny said:

There is really nothing "wrong" w/10,000 days other than having failed to qualify for some of the more elaborate expectations many have invested into it.

No expectation = just another cool rock album from this band. Groove to it chillun

I concur. This is how I feel as well.

[pattentank24]

If you thought Pitchfork was a bad review in terms of content(did you expect anything less?)

Check this one out from this genuis Ayo Jegede at a quality site like Stylus


Tool
10,000 Days
Volcano
2006
D+




On the way to the Indianapolis Verizon Music Center in the summer of 2001, my excitement was palpable but reserved. My buddy Sander played Ænima while we gabbed on about how I discovered Tool through A Perfect Circle and he the other way. Meshuggah was opening, but we had no interest. Instead, fifteen minutes before Tool were to come onstage, we queued up, and after a lax security check, we were in. My heart pounded. Ten minutes passed until the lights faded and a sinister chanting came through the speakers. “The Grudge” began my concert experience and I remained untouchable to the world.

Except for the beer.

This drunk, fat fuck of a redneck thought a Tool concert would be the best time for a Michelob baptism, dousing himself and about three others in it. He ended up being a slight inconvenience the rest of the evening, but there was a good two minutes where I wanted to walk over, shake him, and say: “You buffoon, don’t you know what this song is? This is ‘Reflection,’ it’s talking about getting rid of the ego by using the myth of Narcissus. Don’t you get it? Echo and Narcissus are one! You’re watching yourself pine away!” I didn’t because I thought he was a blip, an aberration among fans. Most of us understood the otherworldly genius of Keenan, Carey, Jones, and Chancellor. Most of us stood resolute and, more importantly, serious in our fidelity.

For the Tool fan, absence doesn’t just make the heart grow fonder—it refreshes their raison d’être. It’s been five years since people realigned their chakras and took a crash course in Greek mythology on Lateralus, and a whopping ten since they discovered Bill Hicks and railed against Jesus on Ænima. Being a Tool fan is as much about the fandom itself as it is the music, for they consider themselves a serious army with a serious credo. Even when the generals don’t bother to innovate, the army is faithful. Even when the generals’ ideas are bullshit, the army will fully consider their merits. How does the band marshal such sycophancy in their fans? Simple: By making them think those years away were spent actually improving the band’s craft.

It’s not true, of course. “Vicarious” is nothing more than “Stinkfist” revisited: on both cuts, Keenan essentially sings about schadenfreude and desensitization. The only difference is that “Vicarious” does so with juvenile imagination:
Stare like a junkie
Into the TV
Stare like a zombie
While the mother holds her child
Watches him die
Hands in the sky
Why oh why
Because I need to watch things die
From a distance
Deep. Carey, Jones, and Chancellor still use the same instrumental leitmotif where they syncopate according to Carey’s drum pattern for a while, Jones breaks off to do a solo, then they reform for another syncopation of a different pattern. Throw in some breaks here and there and you have a seven-minute metal glut causing multiple Mall Gawth hard-ons across the country. Age that song with five years of teases, false leaks, and Internet rumors, though? Those lines are damn near religious.

Such an aging process can even make songs that are literally empty into multitextual and complex creations. “Viginti Tres” (apparently just naming it “Twenty Three” doesn’t have the same ring to it) is the requisite touch of ambient wank one comes to expect from the band—it’s nothing but white noise distorted and amplified. Fans will tell you that you just don’t “get it,” just as in the 70s, King Crimson fans would have said the same about a five-minute recording of Robert Fripp pissing in a cup. Today they call it “Progressive,” which means they’re focusing on the artistic goal (“enlightenment,” “spirituality,” “smoking out”), not necessarily the means. But just because they tell you it’ll grow flowers doesn’t mean they’re not selling you shit.

Besides, “Progressive” doesn’t mean clocking in at over seven minutes no matter what. It doesn’t mean hitting every goddamn skin, tom-tom, and cowbell on your drum set. Being “Progressive” doesn’t justify an album cover that looks like a stoner stumbled upon a documentary on Mayan civilization. I’m not sure, but I think “Progressive” is about growth and change. I think it’s about not being trapped in your own little universe where Everything You Say Matters.

Keenan gave an interview when Lateralus was released in which he admitted the great pressure of a third album, saying that it was sink-or-swim for musicians like T. Rex and The Smashing Pumpkins. But if you take a look at Tool’s closest ilk—Godsmack, Staind, Disturbed—the need for change, for innovation, the argument of pressure pretty much falls flat. This album will once again be dissected and discussed by fans, chewed like cud until the next serving comes five years down the line. Fans will attend the tour enraptured by the band’s “high art” and Carey’s use of tabla, standing like I did as members of some mighty battalion. I can only hope some sauced-up redneck shows up to point out the absurdity of it all

**Slow Clap**

Yes I realize your so much smarter than all of us
but could you at least talk just a smidge about the album
I REALLY would have liked to know if you actually liked the album.

BTW this jackass has recieved as of now 36 comments all which prove how ridiculous this is of a review

Stylus is is usually pretty fair this wasn't

**Resumes listening to 10,000 days**

[skvorisdeadsorta]

Yeah, I was surprised to tell you the truth. Ususally Stylus doesn't denegrate into these kinds of Pitchfork-esque rants, but whew, this one just kind of slipped in under the radar.

I didn't think the Pitchfork review was all that bad really. They gave it a higher rating than I think both Mars Volta releases combined.

[Thorngrub]

10,000 Days dissectional, part 1

What would tool fans do if some day, their band decided to up the ante even further away from a commercial approach -? For instance, release an album w/ fewer bonafide songs, pieced together with the glue of serious, experimental interludes -?

We do not need to wait any further for speculation on this. The answer has arrived, and it is called 10,000 Days: TOOL's most significantly experimental work to date, and their farthest departure from the "beaten path" of the commercial mainstream yet.

There are six songs on this album, plus 5 interludes / intros. I refuse to refer to these pieces of inspired pseudo ambient post-rock as "filler"; and any one who does is simply not investing their full potential into the music offered within this album. It would be precisely tantamount to referring to the sinews and ligaments that hold together your very bones as "filler" material: nothing could be further from the truth, as this musculature is an absolute imperative, and necessary attribute to the organic whole. To dismiss this particular observation is to seriously misjudge the holistic quality inherent to the overall structure of this musical work.

For those who do not have the tenacity to lie still, with eyes closed to see the full spectrum of light refracted from these thoughtful, beautifully meditative pieces, the potential for immense reward shall be lost.

Think of it in this way: Were this 74-minutes of music to have been released Anonymously, or were it to have been released by a completely unknown band or artistic entity, the listener would be forced to apprehend and digest it on its own terms. Which is, actually, exactly how one should approach any of Tool's albums anyhow.

I propose to thee all, both the meek and the brave, the timid and the bold, that the very name or label "TOOL" has served, in this case, to inject a wholly unwarranted sense of expectations in the careless (or carefree) listeners. And by all the primitive gods that ever stemmed from the reptilian core of our consciousness, this band most certainly plays around with that fact, to great and everlasting effect. They circle and tease and feint punches, pull punches, and w/superb timing deliver full punches to the face; they do this with exquisite timing and grace. This band is in complete control. Do not fiddle with the knobs on your stereo too much, aside from that one which says "VOLUME": this one can (and should) be twisted UP towards its maximum range, to further the impact & penetration which every member of the band delivers like a grotesque yet beautifully orchestrated gang rape upon the unsuspecting listener's ears.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear to you all:

Never have I been as thoroughly moved by a TOOL song as I have been by the one-two combo of Wings For Marie (Pt 1) + 10,000 Days (Wings Pt 2). Never in the history of this band's catalogue have I, personally, ever been moved to tears, until now, with this title track alone.

Maybe it's because I myself relate oh so well to Maynard's unabashed love for his recently departed mother. I love my own mother more than anything else in this life, I absolutely cherish the remaining time on this earth we have to spend together. When Maynard sings "Ten thousand days in the fire is long enough, you're going home.

You're the only one who can hold your head up high,
Shake your fists at the gates saying:
'I have come home now!'", it is so overpowering a sentiment, that to say the investment I placed into this song overwhelms me, is an understatement.

The completion of this stanza: "'...Fetch me the spirit, the son, and the father
Tell them their pillar of faith has ascended.
It's time now!
My time now!
Give me my, give me my wings!' " becomes so meaningful, I assimilate the song into my heart as the most moving song in their catalogue, easily, for me.

To mention I cried during the revelation this song posed for me is to face an endless sea of faceless consumers and state "I, too, am set in my ways and my arrogance; the
Burden of Proof is tossed upon the believers."

And when the song concludes with the stanza "You were my witness, my eyes, my evidence,
Judith Marie, unconditional one.

Daylight dims leaving cold fluorescence.
Difficult to see you in this light.
Please forgive this bold suggestion:
Should you see your Maker's face tonight,
Look Him in the eye, look Him in the eye, and tell Him:
"I never lived a lie, never took a life, but surely saved one.
Hallelujah, it's time for you to bring me home.",

I can only say, in all open honesty, that this song is the crown jewel in the TOOL canon in terms of emotional investment and understanding, for me.

[Thorngrub]

10,000 Days dissectional, part 2

And it only begins to soar, from there. The six principal songs interspersed throughout moments of intense meditative inner scrutiny just keep getting better; I am sure they thought their sequence out very carefully. They managed to strike a perfect balance between intense thoughtfulness in alternation with rocking out playfulness. We get a brief reprieve from emotional investment just as soon as "The Pot" starts, and furthermore, get the proverbial rug yanked out from under our feet. That soulful crooning vocal that starts the song off has a wonderful diversity & richness in its subtle tonalities that evokes classic soul music from a bygone era; then when Justin's bassline kicks in, its like a rabbit-snare looping us tightly in its trap and dragging us along kicking & screaming for an unmitigated TOOL ride diving deep into the turbulent waters of their own legacy's roots: the song comes across, in all its wild, unabashed rollicking, like not only a well preserved old-school original plucked from the archives somewhere between Opiate and Undertow, but in addition, like something we've never heard before from them. Yet another paradoxical effect in an endless stream of paradoxes coming from these guys. You either turn away from it, or face it head on. But don't make the mistake of dismissing the song by selectively focusing on any one single aspect, such as the tongue-firmly-placed-in-cheek infectiousness of the "You must've been high" refrain. Doing that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater; such a waste.

The grounding, native-american sounding interlude of "Lipan Conjuring" works as a nice segue into "Lost Keys (Blame Hoffman)", itself merely an introduction to the real, beast-out-of-its-cage song to follow ("Rosetta Stoned"). But let's hold up for a second here before getting ahead of ourselves. The reference to Dr. Albert Hoffman, discoverer of LSD-25, becomes the "key" to allow the conscientious amongs us to peek through the keyhole into the wide vista that the album 10,000 Days offers us (mimicked uncannily by the stereopticon provided with the packaging's format). Just like pure undiluted LSD-25 offers the user an unprecedented clarity of stereo-vision into the nature of reality, so does the reference to "Lost Keys" intimate a clue as to where the album is going. We hear a Dr and nurse exchanging comments over an ailing patient, presumably one who has nearly overdosed on Hoffman's discovery, or a cocktail of substances similar to it. I myself have yet to fully chart out the map of significanse alluded to by this intro, but am pleased enough to have gotten the jist of it.

Then once again these conjurers of meticulously crafted (not to mention superbly executed) melodies once again pull that rug out from under us when the epic "Rosetta Stoned" begins unreeling its chaotic frenzy of progressive aggro. Truly an historic milestone of a song in this band's increasingly intense catalogue. This shit is the very definition of "over the top", yo! I can only imagine how devastating an impact it will have on the crowds in a live forum. God damn, shit the bed . . . something far better said of anyone who can't handle the exquisitely-wrought onslaught brought on by this song.

"Intension" is another interlude that I need to listen to a few more times to say anything worthwhile about. Leave it said I liked what I heard, kinda reminded me of a "sequel" to "Disposition", in a way.

Which brings us to the final, (sixth) true song from this epic album. And "epic", indeed, is the best word to not only describe the scope & intent of the whole album, but more pointedly for this penultimate track, "Right In Two".

This is saving the best for last. This is quintessential TOOL, right here. Seminal TOOL, to use an appropriate term which was formerly (by yours truly, intrepid TOOL-reporter) relegated to describe their album UNDERTOW. "Angels on the sideline, puzzled & amused" indeed (or NOT amused, however the case may be). "Why did Father give these humans free will?
Now they're all confused."

"Don't these talking monkeys know that Eden has enough to go around?
Plenty in this holy garden, silly monkeys
Where there's one you're bound to divide it
Right in Two."

"Angels on the sideline,
Baffled and confused.
Father blessed them all with reason,
And this is what they choose?"

"Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs they forge a blade
And where there's one they're bound to divide it
Right in two."

"Monkey killing monkey killing monkey over pieces of the ground.
Silly monkeys give them thumbs they make a club,
And beat their brother down.
How they survive so misguided is a mystery.
Repugnant is a creature who would squander the ability,
To lift an eye to heaven, conscious of his fleeting time here."

Cutting it all right in two
/ Cutting our love right in two



I leave you with the above-quoted lyrical excerpt as an intimation of the "proof in the pudding" that is incontrovertibly imbedded in every last nuance and molecular constituent of this band's 5th studio release.

10,000 Days is a triumph in every sense of the word. It ups the ante in every conceivable department which this band has laboured to sharpen and hone to perfection over the last 14 years. It is their least -commercial work in a long line of albums which challenge the mainstream status-quo by ironically embracing it. We need no further proof that this band's subversive exploits have met with wideworld approval from a rising ocean of people who return that embrace. That proof was already firmly established even before this album dropped.

Now that it has, simply wait. Have the patience to stand by while the displaced tidal wave of unaffected listeners comes washing back in like a liquid thunderclap to fill the gap of confusion brought on by this dropped bomb that is 10,000 Days.

Clearly, to my experienced ears, 10,000 Days stands firm & proud directly alongside the rest of their catalogue and holds its own amidst their increasingly unique discography. I would like to jump ahead and state it is the best thing they have ever done, but I am far past such a comparative analysis as that. Every album this band ever released stands proudly on its own. And their latest is most certainly no exception to this rule.

[Thorngrub]

"Ayo Jegede " can suck my dick and fucking like it ! \m/

[Galactus]

So...you like it then?

[Thorngrub]

ded said:

So...you like it then?

I did not read that.



;D

[skvorisdeadsorta]

So what's with all of the bad press on the new Tool record? From what I've heard ( I get paid on the 15th, so I will pick it up then) is that it's pretty awesome and the single I heard on the radio was pretty cool, I thought.

[shin]

It has its moments but it's easily their worst.

Jegede got it right when he said Being a Tool fan is as much about the fandom itself as it is the music, for they consider themselves a serious army with a serious credo. Even when the generals don’t bother to innovate, the army is faithful. Even when the generals’ ideas are bullshit, the army will fully consider their merits. How does the band marshal such sycophancy in their fans? Simple: By making them think those years away were spent actually improving the band’s craft.

Every band is allowed a (relative) stinker, and you just have to pick up the pieces and move on to the next album that tickles your fancy. If I'm obligated to like it, like Jegede described, then Tool fans are just smarter versions of louee.

[Thorngrub]

skvorisdeadsorta said:

So what's with all of the bad press on the new Tool record? From what I've heard ( I get paid on the 15th, so I will pick it up then) is that it's pretty awesome and the single I heard on the radio was pretty cool, I thought.

Pay no attention to the "inexperienced" *koff*. The new TOOL album is legendary. There is no doubt that Maynard has reached his peak of pathos- - and therefore, exposed his vulnerability to the max (by penning the most moving ballad about the recent passing of his mother).

Hordes of halfstarved on junkfood drones are going to give this one their cursory spins and then bleakly reach for their next sound-byte, I'm afraid.

However, those who duly pay it the extreme attention it deserves, will reap the immeasurable benefits.


Right up there with their best effort, that much is obvious to this pompous ass.

[Thorngrub]

shin said:

It has its moments but it's easily their worst.

Jegede got it right when he said Being a Tool fan is as much about the fandom itself as it is the music, for they consider themselves a serious army with a serious credo. Even when the generals don’t bother to innovate, the army is faithful. Even when the generals’ ideas are bullshit, the army will fully consider their merits. How does the band marshal such sycophancy in their fans? Simple: By making them think those years away were spent actually improving the band’s craft.

Every band is allowed a (relative) stinker, and you just have to pick up the pieces and move on to the next album that tickles your fancy. If I'm obligated to like it, like Jegede described, then Tool fans are just smarter versions of louee.

Were you hatched-? This reviewer Jegede is the pompous ass, not I. I ain't about the fuckin fandom - and if you think I am, fuck you very much.

I spelled it all out in my carefully written review (in English), posted a page back or so. I'm sure you merely skimmed over it, because if you HAD read every word, and allowed it to sink in, you'd maybe rise out of your shellshocked ignorance and offer me some consolation prize.


If you think you're "obligated to like it, like that clueless fuck described", then you need to eat more Wheaties, Mr. Cuz you ain't obligated to do shit.

Anyone who even dares try and insinuate that I am in any shape some "mindless tool clone" is going to get the red hot thorn-poker up the ass. And I'm not talking about my cock, so don't get your hopes up.

[Thorngrub]

Make no mistake about it; I'm done with all this mewling barely-concealed contempt for my enthusiastic support of this band's music. Bring it on shin, Ndy, I don't give a fuck. If you wanna split hairs and consistently ignore important points I took the time to painstakingly write, then you can fuck straight off. That said w/a smile & a wink.


Read my fucking review and try responding to its points like an adult, for a change. No wonder certain people vested with a level of maturity have abandoned "that other" board. Me? I'm just a fucked up A-hole with tons o' love for both sides of the fence.

Go ahead and post something else utterly devoid of careful thought: I dare you

[Thorngrub]

...it's just a message board, shin...