On Fear Inoculum, Tool started making songs that more accurately played out like movements in a symphony. Or, put another way, they are “big bites to chew” as drummer Danny Carey told Kerrang!. It was a trait that had been glimpsed before on previous outings, but never on this sustained scale. On the title-track and Descending, Tool’s music is more knotted, winding and intricately conceived than ever before.
It is, of course, entirely possible to totally overthink this record, and completely lose yourself in polyrhythmic intricacies, be it the 7/4, 7/3 and 7/8 time signatures or Danny’s Billy Cobham-inspired jazz drumming on the hypnotic Chocolate Chip Trip. But for all the mathy intelligence funnelled into this album, it was never at the expense of immediacy. There is a reason jaws remained firmly dropped as Tool played their new material during their headline slot at this summer’s Download festival. If you think of older propulsive songs like Jambi or Ænema as playing out like footage of a nuclear bomb in real time, a labyrinthine track such as Invincible is akin to that same incredible power being captured in slow motion. Yes, song lengths may have ballooned, but they never felt bloated. 7empest is 15 minutes and 44 seconds long, but that simply meant more time in which to marvel at its elemental force.
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The widened scope of Tool’s sound isn’t just down to the phenomenal musicality of Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Justin Chancellor. Vocalist Maynard James Keenan had a major role in this, too. “It wasn’t just what he was singing, but what he didn’t sing,” praised Danny of Maynard’s work on Fear Inoculum. “The spaces that he left, to let these compositions we’d worked our heart and soul out on shine.” But while there is more space than ever before for instrumental slow-boiling this time around, Maynard’s presence on the album is not defined by its comparative absence: his voice is magnified, not marginalised. On Fear Inoculum he’s always there, lurking in the background, ready to cut your throat with a razor-sharp line or melody when you least expect it.
Speaking of which, folks… Lyrically, Maynard offers an array of both private and shared dreads – the terrors of the spirit, of aging, of irrelevance, of humanity’s hubris. Whether he relays this with incantatory grace on Pneuma or gleeful menace on 7empest (‘Calm as cookies and cream, so it seems / We’re not buying your dubious state of serenity’) the results are breathtaking. And if Maynard’s ability with words is one thing to praise, his voice is another altogether. His great gift as a singer is not just the ability to locate notes that other vocalists would never think of. Rather, it’s the ease with which he pairs said notes with words that really should be incompatible with melody. It stands to reason that there should be no way to sing the title-track’s lyric, ‘My own / Mitosis / Growing through / Division from mania’ and make it sound graceful. Time and again on this record, however, Maynard pulls off this feat.