So, it’s started. Here begins the end of the wait. In 23 days, we will have the full thing, Fear Inoculum in all its lengthy, twisted, long-awaited glory. That for the most painfully-anticipated album of the year the band have barely made a peep, teased almost nothing, and given very few proper, concrete signals on anything to do with anything, is actually the most reliably expected thing around the whole enterprise. Tool have always operated like this – and with almost a decade and a half of basically going ‘I dunno, LOL’ as the answer to any questions about when the follow-up to 10,000 Days is coming, they have got extremely good at appearing to tease while giving away absolutely fuck all.
Now we have a piece of the puzzle, the album’s sprawling title-track, what does it all mean? Obviously, this monolithic musical maze makes much more sense in the context of its reverentially long home, with the on and off ramps to its preceding and subsequent tracks painfully crafted to perfection, but as a glimpse into a world where jokes about the album never coming are redundant, it is a fine vista. Satisfyingly, it’s enough to take a decent enough bath in to get the measure of where Tool are going, and for them to let you breathe it in deeply, rather than a quick, three-minute single and crap video.