A Perfect Circle
– Eat the Elephant
This isn’t the guttural stomp of Mer de Noms or the sleek rage of Thirteenth Step. Eat the Elephant feels like a late-night transmission from a room you don’t remember entering. It moves slower, breathes deeper, and burns colder. Maynard James Keenan isn’t screaming anymore—he’s murmuring, pleading, prodding. The band has traded distortion for detachment, urgency for unease. And while that might frustrate fans waiting for a riff to detonate, it’s exactly what makes this album so unnerving.
Billy Howerdel guides the whole thing like a clockmaker on sedatives. Pianos take the lead, strings whisper in the background, and electronics flicker like bad reception. These aren’t songs designed to grab you by the throat. They sit in the corner, stare at you, and ask uncomfortable questions. Eat the Elephant sounds less like a comeback and more like a resignation letter written in disappearing ink. It’s about power, decay, delusion—and the strange numbness that comes after screaming too long into a void.
Lyrically, Maynard’s still swinging—just not with clenched fists. He’s mocking cults, crushing apathy, and unraveling the thread between belief and blindness. The album asks for patience. And maybe trust. You won’t find instant gratification here. No anthems to blast out of car windows. But what it does offer is something far weirder and stickier: a slow drip of despair that feels earned, even graceful.
Choice Tracks
The Doomed
A sneer wrapped in elegance. Piano-led and full of bile, it sets fire to the myth of moral superiority. Maynard isn’t so much singing as issuing a sermon to a broken congregation. It builds with icy precision, then leaves you cold on the floor.
Disillusioned
This is where the album hits hardest emotionally. A slow climb from quiet keys to aching crescendo. It’s about attention, distraction, and forgetting how to be human. The line “Time to put the silicon obsession down” doesn’t ask—it commands. You feel it in your gut.
TalkTalk
Cynicism dressed up in a lullaby. It’s a soft piano ballad with a jagged edge, challenging false saviors and empty prayers. The chorus swells like hope, only to sink back into disillusionment. Gospel by way of a dimly lit dive bar.
Eat the Elephant
The title track opens the record with hesitant piano and the weight of indecision. It’s fragile, barely holding together, but somehow that fragility is the point. You’re not given answers—just an invitation to sit with the heaviness.
Hourglass
The closest the album comes to electronic menace. It throbs with processed vocals and jittery beats, like Nine Inch Nails on downers. It doesn’t explode, but it stalks you, all teeth and smirk.
Eat the Elephant won’t please everyone. It’s too quiet for the headbangers, too bleak for the romantics, and too strange for background noise. But if you’re in the right place—mentally, emotionally, existentially—it lands like a punch you didn’t see coming. Slow, deliberate, and haunting. A record for the end of the party, when the lights come on and no one knows how to leave.