Blog On The Motorway

Cross Blogination is a project I’m doing with Diary Of A Ledger, the idea being every week one of us will recommend to the other one of our all time favourite albums, which we will then both write a review for.  This week it’s my turn again, so it’s time for my favourite album of all time.

This is to me the greatest example of what a band or artist can do within the confines of the ‘album.’  It is the album I recommend more than any other to random people when I meet them, or even to indie loving people I meet on the internet. It is the album that taught me the possibilities of what ‘heavy’ music could do. Hell, it even got me into the late great Bill Hicks. Trying to sum up how I feel about this album will be pretty difficult, and even harder in a short space. So apologies.

I had heard of Tool but not heard any of their stuff when my friend who worked in HMV in Sunderland recommended this album to me with such gusto that I felt I couldn’t refuse. I took it home and by the end of the first track, ‘Stinkfist’, I was absolutely blown away.  Sounding unlike any other band I had heard before they melded the thick riffs of Adam Jones with a deftness and subtlety I hadn’t heard before in ‘Heavy Rock’.  The drums alternate between jazzy tribal rhythms and thunderous attacks, with the bass and guitar layered over the top to create a clinical and yet warm sound.  Technically Tool are amazing, but never ‘showey.’ And then there was the voice of one Maynard James Keenan.

All great bands need a great front-man, but Tool have one of the most unique talents in Maynard. With a range that would put every contestant on every X Factor to shame (check out the note he hits on ‘Pushit’) coupled with a wonderfully comic playfulness and a deadpan delivery, there are several times when his voice makes all of the hairs stand up over my whole body.  And then you work out what he’s singing about and you can’t help but smile.

For instance, take opener ‘Stinkfist’, which has to be the world’s most beautiful peon to anal fisting, with the immortal lines ‘Elbow deep inside the borderline. Show me that you love me and that we belong together. Shoulder deep within the borderline. Relax. Turn around and take my hand.’ These are delivered with a straight deadpan voice over clattering great riffs.

Next up is Eulogy, which starts with a bewildering and tender instrumental lead in, which is soon shackled to a dirty great riff.  As it twists and turns it builds slowly around Maynard’s lyric, which initially seems to be about his late friend Bill Hicks, but then morphs into a quasi-religious allegory about how the people we worship will let us down.

Bill Hicks was a huge influence on this album.  Maynard and Bill had become close friends in the period leading up to Bill’s death, and this album was recorded in the period just afterward. The artwork has a bizarre paining of Bill, and his act is the basis of many different strands of songs, most notably the title track, which is based around Bill’s sketch about LA falling into the ocean and leaving only Arizona Bay, and the last track Third Eye, a fifteen minute sprawling epic about the joys of hallucinogens.

The band are at their most mischievous during the several interludes which tie the album together.  ‘Message To Harry Manback’ is a surreal piano line over which the band overlay a real message left on their answerphone by a crazed Italian fan, while the sound of birds plays softly in the background.  ‘Die Eier Von Satan’ is downright creepy though, as pre-Rammstein industrial music is overlaid with an austere German voice.  Slowly it builds and builds, with crowd noise greeting more and more enthusiastically the words spoken. When the line ‘Bei zweihundert Grad für fünfzehn Minuten backen und KEINE EIER!’ is barked to a massive cheer, I must admit I found myself wondering exactly what the intentions of this band were.  That was until I went online and found the lyrics translated to a recipe for vegan hash brownies.

By far my favourite moment of the album is the centrepiece of the album, ‘Hooker With A Penis’ the heaviest song on display, and the best comeback to an insult ever committed to record. Having been told by a fan that they had ‘sold out’ Maynard spits out a diatribe as to the idiocy of this argument.  (After all, they remained signed to an independent label, made no advance copies available for radio and plastered the cover with a sticker saying ‘No number 1 f**king hit singles’.) I could print the whole lyrics, but I’ll try to limit myself to these choice lines;

“All you know about me is what I’ve sold you, dumb fuck.
I sold out long before you ever heard my name. I sold my soul to make a record, dip shit, and you bought one.

All you read and wear or see and hear on TV is a product
Begging for your fatass dirty dollar so…

Shut up and buy my new record send more money
Fuck you, buddy.”

There is a wonderful flow to this album, where little interludes build into huge slabs of guitars, and the mood fluctuates constantly between the surreal and the divine.  Take the way ‘Intermission’ leads into ‘Jimmy’ by taking the main riff of the latter and turns it into a carnival theme.

There are no bad songs here, and while it is indulgent throughout the course of its whole run, it never comes across as pious or boring.  Throughout, Maynard’s voice swirls and dazzles, its fragile beauty elevating the music underneath it to a wider scale.

If there is ever an argument for the prefect album I will state the case for this album even if I have to kill every Beatles and Beach Boys fan on the planet to do so.  That’s how much this album means to me.  Uncompromising and uncompromised, this is a truly unique moment in music, and one that even the band themselves have never been able to match.

5+/5

So I guess you could say that I like it.  Now go over to Gray’s blog and see what he makes of it. If he didn’t like it, I’m going to subject him to some of the heaviest brutal metal I can find next time.

Tool – Ænema [uncut version]