THE MUSICAL BOX

Was the wait worth it for the new Tool album? We find out. Plus reviews of Chelsea Wolfe, Iamthemorning, The Utopia Strong, Thom Yorke, Fruupp, Eddie Jobson, Yes: 50 Live and more.

It’s here, at last! The most talked-about comeback of the last decade, kept tightly under wraps by progressive rock’s most enigmatic quartet and their cryptic cabal. But is the monster-length follow-up to 10,000 Days the Tool album that we all hoped for?

Much like the curate’s egg, Tool’s long-awaited new album is good in parts. Some people will tell you the 13-year gestation was worth every moment, that avid anticipation has its own reward, and those people are best avoided, especially in lines for all-you-can-eat buffet and the inscrutable geometry of the queues on theme park rides. What, you’ll think, are they talking about?

It’s good, even great in moments like the spiralling Invincible, but if Fear Inoculum isn’t the work of a band that have driven themselves to distraction and then mad and muddied in their pursuit of greatness in the studio, then we must have missed a meeting. Stand this up next to an album such as 1996’s AEnima or even their 1993 Undertow debut and the jigsawing of songs together sounds self-evident; you can feel the cogs whirring into place, the tectonic plates of their creativity waiting to settle.

Original bassist Paul D’Amour left during the recording sessions for AEnima, and years later he complained that: “Their creative process is excruciating and tedious, and

I guess I never felt the desire to play a riff

500 times before I can confirm that it’s good; that’s why it takes them eight years to write an album.” It’s a salient point, though no one’s denying the deeply creative grooves of AEnima or their 2001 Lateralus record, but it’s been 13 long years since 10,000 Days and, one has to ask, was it worth the wait?

A protracted lawsuit and what sounds like a hard-to-define indifference seems to have been the cause of a decade-plus pause. The band aren’t especially vocal in the public realm and the layers of secrecy (phones taken away at the door, an NDA to sign before you can hear a note) over a major release like this requires you to sit in a shadowy room with other writers and nod sagely at each other as another key change set at bowel-loosening volume looms into earshot. Not that there’s

much about Tool that’s ever been easy; their musical craft and insight is set so high as to be almost out of sight. They’ve been described as Pink Floyd on steroids, but even Floyd sang songs such as Wish You Were Here occasionally. They have glimmered brilliantly; this writer remembers the first time they played Sober at a club show and felt stilled and moved at the same time. Their elegiac beauty is not to be denied, but that doesn’t instantly translate to the music they’re still making ringing true through the ages like those songs once did.

You can hear the endless days of the studio interior throughout the entire album; there’s percussion on everything, sound effects, Moogs and Mellotron. They dress up a drum solo in synth sounds that could have come off the Stranger Things soundtrack and the intro to Pink Floyd’s Time and call it Chocolate Chip Trip. It must have been an odd day at the mixing desk when they pushed back their chairs and thought, yep, drum solo, nailed it, that’ll work on the album, let’s get some sushi.

Which makes it sound like a decrying of the album, when it’s not. It’s being placed alongside their previous work and it’s wanting. The title track slides in on a keyboard sound that recalls the Get Carter theme (70s instrumentation or an approximation thereof is all over the record) before falling into a familiar revolving drum pattern and Keenan’s obtuse vocals, which almost dares a melody to attach itself to his lyrics. It’s very familiar Tool fare and none the worse for that. Ditto Pneuma, music so dense you can almost see the blocks it’s built from, heavily textured with percussive splashes, Maynard’s keening (excuse the pun) vocal: ‘We are the spark, eyes full of wonder…’.

It’s a not unfamiliar abstraction, his stuttering phrasing rolled out over the body of the song, gliding atop it, his delivery juxtaposed alongside the music, rarely at its heart.

Along with Invincible, Descending is, if not the best song on the record, one of its most accessible (the kind of statement, you’d imagine, that would make Tool hoot with derision). Layered, dense and clever, it manages to hint at Gojira’s power and Floyd’s otherworldliness. It’s playful and enigmatic and seems, sadly, out of step with a lot of the album. Culling Voices is all staccato guitar and a vocal line that recalls Stormwatch-era Ian Anderson, but then becomes strangely rudderless, as if it can’t decide how or where it should end. 7empest, the last hurrah, escalating riff upon riff that drifts between a creeping Dario Argento movie theme and Tony Iommi at his most bombastic. Truth be told, it’s hard to tear yourself away from Tool at full tilt, and its hard not feel their magic as its realised, but those moments are fleeting, flashes of light quickly fading as diminishing returns.

Their elegiac beauty isn’t to be denied, but that doesn’t instantly translate here.