Tool - 10,000 Days

The fun thing about guestimating numbers is that you can find all sorts of coincidences. Is 10,000 days the length of time Maynard's mom lived after her stroke, or is it the orbital length of Saturn, or is there just some magical universal force that makes approaching 30 pretty awful? Great news, coincidence says all three are roughly the same amount of inaccurate, so they all get to be true! 

I'm skipping over the increasingly lavish packaging, but there's more lovely Alex Grey, DMT inspired artwork. The album is sort of meant to be the moment of breakthrough. The DMT breakthrough is generally when you meet the elves and feel like you're living in the higher plane of the eternal, then they say you've still got work to do so see you next time. Individual experiences vary on the details. 

We start out being unwilling to accept death, now we have to come to terms with it in often excrutiatingly painful ways, and finally we can step through. You get serious and intentionally juvenile sillyness like any Tool album, because that's the way life works. The bassline of Jambi reminded Adam of Peewee's Playhouse, so Maynard wrote it about granting wishes. 

Some critics bring up the length and pretense, and hate the interludes, but that's an intentional part of Tool, so it's hard to defend being surprised by them doing what they intended to do all along. As for living in your own world where every tiny little detail matters, that's what it's about. The album is literally the opportunity to transcend it. If some part if your psyche requires you to dismiss it, so be it. Keep in mind, this is their penultimate album. The next one is the last one and this is one more step toward the edge. 

Personally, this album gives me whole-body ASMR chills, an every once in a while does actually make me cry. It's intense. 

I haven't really said much about production, but these things are so incredibly complicated and meticulous, foreshadowed echoes at the edge of hearing, tone blending and stacking, large scale structural and timing relationships, and on and on. You can pull tracks out, but the albums are designed to be listened to in one continuous stream without breaks. 

Why the mishmash of real experience and pseudo-scientific occultism? Because we are metaphor machines, and we're always looking for some explanation why. It's not about the real, it's about listening to the repressed side of our psyche and trying to become whole, meeting in the middle and transcending. Maynard described this album as a hopeful gift, an attempt to demonstrate his own breakthrough. We get all the treads of thought again, pieces of the larger puzzle, the personal memories, the ritualized mysticism, the aliens, and the psychedelic drugs, with the added understanding that this is itself a vicarious experience. A lot of people find these albums insulting, tedious, pretentious, but i hear them as face value expressions of honesty. I can't know them as individuals, but i can listen to what they have to say and incorporate that experience into my own as much as possible. They aren't trying to trick anybody, in fact they take the creation quite serious as art. 

I've told you about my own borderline episodes, and that's what Right in Two is about for me. And we conclude with some Latin about The Rapture. You see kiddos, after the rapture there's a period of peace, then a period of horror, and as fans of infinity know, we get to do it all over again. The universe has an infinite supply of anti-christs. Lots of beautiful numerological coincidences with the number 23, by the way. 

And lastly remember, we've been dealing with binary oppositions this whole time, title puns, black and white, the real and the metaphysical, and so on. 13 more years of personal and legal gobbledigook before the next one.

Fear Inoculum