Tool - Aenima

There are lots of interesting stories about Tool's career, too many for me to cover all in one go actually, but we get a 3 year gap before Aenima. Partly it's because their bassist left the band, but also because these guys do other stuff. Maynard has a foot in the stand-up comedy world, and his side project Puscifer was born as a way to improv on stage. He liked Bill Hicks a lot. He also eventually moved to Arizona and started his own vinyard. Adam is a full on sci-fi/horror effects artist. Danny was a session drummer and played with Carole King of all people before Tool. 

This is also the pre highspeed internet world. 56k modems are brand new and psychotically expensive. It's hard to generate national buzz when MTV refuses to broadcast your videos, even after midnight. They aren't driving a van all over the country to advertise themselves like everyone before them. They also have the old school kind of multi-album record deals to deal with, but Wal-mart is demanding censored reprints and the few upper execs who bothered to listen to any of it are taking that calling out hypocrisy thing a little personal. Fans don't really know any of that stuff, they just want another Tool album. 

So, all that stuff gets mixed into a delightful shade of brown for their next album. Tool is a music first, Maynard figures out what to sing over it, kind of band. He has 4 or 5 large-scale streams of thought going on, and each album gets bits and pieces of it. 

I'll also point out that this album has an intermission that segues into the second half, a surprisingly common trope for the time (see Offspring's Ixnay...). And sadly, my copies of Aenima and Lateralus suffered their own deaths a long time ago, so i can't take photos. Oh well. 

So, what is this thing? Without getting too technical, this is Maynard "assimilating his shadow" as a path to enlightenment. With getting technical, you need an professional arsenal of relevant personal and psychological details delivered by a Snap-On truck (tool joke, yay!): 

Psychedelic drugs, new age gobbledigook, Jungian shadow theory, high level math (yes, involving infinity), a Bill Hicks archive marathon, his mom's stroke and 10,000 days of suffering, an intense hatred of LA and consumer culture in general, an equally intense aversion to supposed authority, a love of puns, and a 77 minute attention span. 

It will take a long time to wrap your head around all of it, but it's not nearly as unsavory as Undertow probably was. Opiate was the rage, Undertow was giving the subcounscious a voice and letting it take over, now we get the assimilation and a "becoming whole." He is literally prying open his third eye by any means necessary. 

Aenima is probably my favorite album of the bunch, but the next two are pretty awesome as well. Their last album, Fear Inoculum isn't in my head like the others, but the few listens i've given it were quite enjoyable. We'll try to grasp it when the time comes. 

Oh, yeah, Drunvalo Melchizedek's chromosome theory is total garbage (there are no 42+2 humans, aboriginal or otherwise), but Maynard is merely using it as an obscure metaphor for enlightenment, not suggesting he's about to spontaneously grow another pair of chromosomes. 

I suppose it's worth noting that they all love the occult/sci-fi/horror/metahysical/Alastair Crowley kind of stuff. Holy cow, look at the time. I mentioned these things are loooooong, and it's way past my bedtime. See you tomorrow night for the parabolic acid trip through the universe that is their next album.

Lateralus