TOOL

[Orestes]

The best band ever. Discuss.

[whodeyAtown21]

Bold statement.




True statement.

[Orestes]

Bold statement.




True statement.

Have you ever had the good fortune to see them live?

I have three times, and I still have the pee stained paints hanging in my closet.

[RiverRatZap]

The best band ever. Discuss.

My favorite as well, never heard a Tool song I didn't like.

[The Gloaming]

Tool sucks....and by sucks....I mean is probably the greatest thing to ever jam the planet.


I'm assuming that everyone here would like to get home safely. So, we need the crowd, up in the front, to take two steps back. Two steps back. Two steps back. Now, add two more steps, four steps back. One more, five steps back. Two steps. Five steps. Good move. We are the 'Scottville Clown Band', thank you very much for coming.

[Orestes]

[Ruban9]

THE Greatest band of all time...not close...perfection

[Orestes]

I spent the entire summer listening to other things and hadn't heard Tool for a while. Today, I listened to Undertow, Aenema, Lateralus, and 10,000 Days. Amazing. It's even more incredible when you haven't heard them in a while.

The first time I heard Rosetta Stoned, I walked into my room, looked in the mirror, and decided my world had changed forever. When Maynard sang "Overwhelmed as one would be, placed in my position" I knew at that moment, that I had witnessed perfection.

[swbaseballfan]

pop in some ICP, you think the only tool you you will ever need again is the one you pee with

i do like tool, like them a lot. schizm and lateralus are my favs of theirs, but i rarely listen to anything outside of psychopathic records anymore

[Orestes]

Tool is an art form. For instance.. this review of Lateralus (My favorite album) by Rolling Stone..

You need time to deal with Lateralus - a lot more than the seventy-seven minutes it takes just to play the whole disc. And for much of that time, you will wonder: What the **** is going on here? Drums, bass and guitars move in jarring cycles of hyperhowl and near-silent death march. The mix is inside out - roiling percussion and grunting bass to the fore; the singer bellowing from the far back of the band's black roar. And where is the melodic and narrative resolution in this crushing darkness? Do these asymmetrical chunks of distemper - one-minute sound games, jumbo two- and three-part suites - even qualify as songs?

So much of Tool's third full-length studio album - five years in the waiting, due in part to extended legal turbulence - makes so little sense at first. But that is one of Lateralus' most endearing qualities: It rolls out its pleasures and coherence slowly, even stubbornly. Most of the so-called new metal has the dramatic heft of thin air. But the L.A.-based Tool - guitarist Adam Jones, vocalist Maynard James Keenan (back from his other band, A Perfect Circle), drummer Danny Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor - are obsessed with weight, the cumulative force of muscle, imagination and immaculately wrought suspense. Tool have everything it takes to beat you senseless; they proved it on 1993's Undertow and their 1996 Grammy-winning beast, Aenima. Here, Tool go to extravagant lengths to drown you in sensation.

The prolonged running times of most of Lateralus' thirteen tracks are misleading; the entire album rolls and stomps with suitelike purpose. In "The Grudge" (8:34), "Schism" (6:43) and "Lateralus" (9:22), the episodic swerves are compressed under single titles. Other numbers run together like connective tissue. "Parabol" and "Parabola" are basically distorted reflections of each other, twinned images of the same nightmare. In "Parabol," Keenan's voice is bathed in wet, gray echo and crawls like a wounded man through the implied devastation of Carey's hissing cymbals and Chancellor's gaunt bass lines. "Parabola" is the emotional remix, an explosive rescoring of that agony with the additional payoff of hard-won deliverance. Carey goes into jungle-telegraph overdrive, and Jones' guitar is a colossus of distortion; his break just past the midway point is so broad and dense with fuzz that it doesn't seem to have any notes - or air. You could die of suffocation in there.

"Ticks and Leeches" needs every one of its eight minutes to reach its bloody apogee. The song is an opera of nervous tics: the vicious chop of the central hook; a sudden drop into virtual nothing; the cleaving effect of Keenan's charred screaming; a final triple-time freakout. Some sections stop on a dime, in mid-rage; the quiet bit is a serious test of patience, a long veil of faint strum and smothering peril. But each of those changes is a potent, necessary link in a snowballing indictment of parasitic evil. When Keenan goes into his climactic seizure ("Suuuck! Meee! Dryyy!"), he sounds like he's truly up to his neck in harpies and lawyers.

In another era, Lateralus - co-produced by Tool and engineer David Bottrill - would have been considered progressive rock, ten tons of impressive pretension. Jones' hairpin riffing in "The Grudge," the cool, dreamy intro of "The Patient" and Carey's frenetic Afro-Zeppelin drumming all over the record suggest a grand mutant blend of vintage Jane's Addiction and King Crimson circa Larks' Tongues in Aspic. The only things separating Pink Floyd's spacewalk "Echoes" - which ate up Side Two of 1971's Meddle - and the twenty-two-minute sequence of "Disposition," "Reflection" and "Triad" on Lateralus are thirty years and Tool's impulse to cram every inch of infinity with hard guitar meat and absolute dread.

But in this heavy-music century, awash in masks, turntables and Ming the Merciless goatees, Lateralus stands for a vanishing common sense in hard rock: that the only extremes that matter are those in the music. Indeed, the most amazing thing about Lateralus is Tool's extraordinary restraint. One reason why these songs seem to go on forever is that the band never rushes a good idea: the soft, protracted tension of "Disposition"; the Arabic-metal jamming in "Triad."

But the reason you don't keep checking your watch is because Tool never play like they're just killing time. "I know/The pieces fit," Keenan swears repeatedly against the rolling thunder of "Schism." Lateralus is a monster of many parts, made to be swallowed whole.

[The Gloaming]

pop in some ICP, you think the only tool you you will ever need again is the one you pee with

i do like tool, like them a lot. schizm and lateralus are my favs of theirs, but i rarely listen to anything outside of psychopathic records anymore

ICP is TERRIBLE........note to self..never take anything SWbaseballfan says into consideration.

[Ruban9]

Here is a good interview with Maynard

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT9A7lm8d4I&NR=1

[swbaseballfan]

pop in some ICP, you think the only tool you you will ever need again is the one you pee with

i do like tool, like them a lot. schizm and lateralus are my favs of theirs, but i rarely listen to anything outside of psychopathic records anymore

ICP is TERRIBLE........note to self..never take anything SWbaseballfan says into consideration.

WAKKA WAKKA WAKKA......

icp is just the famous name people have heard of. there are many other artists who sing under their label psychopathic records. twiztid and boondox are my 2 favorites. icp realy isnt that great to be honest, i just get a laugh from some of their lyrics. the guy who mixxes most of their music for them has been putting out albums of his own here recently, let em bleed volumes 1, 2, and 3 all just last year, and volume 4 set to drop this spring. he has an amazing voice, and the beats he creates are second to none.

boondox has a style like no other. i consider it country/rap/horrorcore...

now back to tool......did anyone ever like a perfect circle? i got their first cd and wore it out. after that i never cared for them much

[Orestes]

I like A Perfect Circle quite a bit. Though, I do like Tool better.

Anyone like Puscifer?

The latest video from Maynard's most recent project...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dR3ccmWmLhk

[bushmaster24]

my son loves this band. never really listened to them very much but from what i have heard they are pretty good.

[Orestes]

One of the finer drummers of all time.....


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUcdMva9RnQ

[Orestes]

[Orestes]

[Ruban9]

Tool is a band that can make you break a mental sweat. Every time I hear them, I am in awe. I hush in my mind everything else around me. It is easy to say that Tool has become a part of me. They stand as an amazing breath of fresh air amongst a generation of music that is cold and ugly. There are so many bands like Nickleback headed by some jerk-off, it would take a good opiate to make them tolerable in which to listen.

[Orestes]

Tool is a band that can make you break a mental sweat. Every time I hear them, I am in awe. I hush in my mind everything else around me. It is easy to say that Tool has become a part of me. They stand as an amazing breath of fresh air amongst a generation of music that is cold and ugly. There are so many bands like Nickleback headed by some jerk-off, it would take a good opiate to make them tolerable in which to listen.

Awesome...

I thought I saw a Maynard James Keenan look-alike at the Athens Halloween Block Party.... That was pretty sweet too...