Tool
– Lateralus
Tool doesn’t write songs so much as rituals. Lateralus isn’t a record you casually toss on while folding laundry. It demands attention, patience, and maybe a stiff drink or two. It’s architecture in sound—songs spiraling inward and outward, like Fibonacci’s ghost decided to front a prog-metal band with a few scores to settle. If Ænima was a cleansing, Lateralus is the slow-motion reconstruction of the soul that follows.
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What makes Tool unique—annoying to some, vital to others—is their refusal to spoon-feed. These songs unfold in layers, sometimes crawling for minutes before they even decide what tempo they want to live in. Danny Carey drums like a sentient machine built by druids. Justin Chancellor’s basslines are the dark river running underneath. And Adam Jones’s guitar? It doesn’t riff as much as it carves, slicing time and space with every bend and squeal.
Then there’s Maynard James Keenan—part philosopher, part banshee. He’s rarely front and center, more often echoing in the margins or weaving through the walls. His lyrics here aren’t sermons, they’re riddles. You don’t “get” them. You sit with them. Let them infect your bones over weeks, months, sometimes years. This isn’t music for quick hits. This is music for people who like to get lost and don’t mind a few existential bruises along the way.
Choice Tracks
Schism
That bassline—immediately identifiable, instantly unsettling. “Schism” takes the idea of broken communication and plays it out in real time, musically and emotionally. The time signatures twist like a failing relationship, but it still grooves. A paradox in real-time.
Lateralus
Here’s where math meets meaning. Structured around the Fibonacci sequence (because of course it is), this track feels like a body being rebuilt from atoms. Keenan’s vocal climb—“Spiral out, keep going”—isn’t advice. It’s a commandment. One of the boldest, most oddly uplifting songs ever born from so much darkness.
Parabola
The second half of a two-part meditation that builds from ethereal calm to unrelenting catharsis. “Parabola” feels like someone waking up inside their own skin for the first time. It’s ecstatic without being cheesy, spiritual without losing its grit.
The Grudge
The album’s opening monolith. Danny Carey comes out swinging, and everyone else follows like they’re dragging ancient chains behind them. It’s a song about letting go—grudges, pride, old ghosts—and it builds to a vocal scream so long and savage it deserves its own postal code.
Ticks & Leeches
The one where Maynard loses his mind. And we’re lucky enough to hear it. An outlier on the album, it’s pure fury, delivered with the restraint of a man who just found the knife drawer. The shrieked verses feel dangerous. The quiet interlude? Even more so.
Lateralus is less an album than a high-wire act over a bottomless pit of human need. Tool doesn’t offer comfort. They offer challenge. And if you’re up for it, they might just teach you something about yourself that’s hard to unhear.