Tool: ÆNIMA by Rolling Stone

I hate reviewing new music. Hate it.
As a musician who has seen my fair share of rough reviews, I know how it feels to hear (err- read, as in “This Has Been Written And Therefore It Is So“) someone talking mean about your baby.
The good ones? In one ear and out the other, honestly. But the bad ones… hurt a little. Add into it the fact that these days, when they’re bad, they’re not just bad - they’re BRUTAL.
Only you know what it took to make this album.
Only you know why you did what you did - and if you have any art to your stuff, you don’t go explaining every little step. Them’s the rules. Half the fun for me as a listener is finding my own meaning in songs; as an artist, the most excitement I get from music is hoping others catch what I’m putting out there. I like those dynamics, the risk is worth the reward. The price of that risk can be that no one gets anything you’ve done, or worse… compares it to something you can’t stand!
Only you know what the album - your new baby - means to you.
Logically, it would follow that only you know how it feels to be told, “DAMN! Your baby is ugly.”

I’d like you to keep that in mind from here on out as we put a slight twist on the term “Album Review” with what we call, simply:
Reviews… of Reviews.

Most of the time these babies will be of current albums that we think should get a little more attentive attention. We’ll do our best. Most of the time. That will be all well and good, but as I’ve stated before: I don’t believe that a review is even worth reading unless the person reviewing the album has had some time to experience that album beyond what I’m convinced is the usual regimen of today’s “music critic” - a cursory listen to something the “critic” gets in the mail scattered between reality television shows and too many hours on the XBOX360. I think the real soul of this idea will come from revisiting some of the albums that have stood the test of time after having originally been panned by the self-important fascist regime of Those Who Cannot Do.

With that in mind: Let us begin.
My first offering was in many ways the inspiration for this perspective on the traditional “album review.” Almost 15 years ago, Tool put an album out that changed not only my perception of where Rock music could go, but most of the Stavesacre boys’ perspective (No… what???) and that of an entire generation of Hard Rock music fans and musicians:
ÆNIMA

I’d been a fan of the band since the first E.P. because I felt they bore favorable comparisons to Quicksand. After I spent some time really studying the artwork of the Opiate E.P. I got kinda creeped out, immediately deciding Quicksand was more my speed. Then Undertow came out and I thought, “Hold on… this band is on something else,” Plus: they scared me, honestly. I’d met Danzig and was familiar with the whole Mysterious Rock Singer as Badass image. It was all the rage in the early 90’s: The Frightening Artist.
Where Danzig had all the Devil imagery in his songs - he’d taken the totally original Vaudevillian-meets-B-Horror-Movie cool of the Misfits and appeared to have convinced himself that he really was some kind of werewolf or something - but this band was talking about… other things. Things that were actually both disgusting and utterly disturbing - real things. I won’t go into detail, but suffice to say that some of the previously untapped metaphors utilized in songs called “Prison Sex” and “4º” left one feeling slightly light headed upon repeated listens.
After I saw that creepy little video for “Sober” - where Maynard appears as a blurry nightmare of an image for about 2 seconds - I remember thinking:
Maynard is far scarier than Glenn Danzig - like, I think he’d do something crazy if they got into a fight, like eat his liver or something.
And I wasn’t the only one.

By the time ÆNIMA dropped, Quicksand was history (along with what I’d mistakenly believed was the second wave of Punk Rock) and Danzig was about as scary as that kid from school who played Dungeons & Dragons. (Or World of Warcraft for those of you who have no idea what a 12 sided-die is.) I clearly remember hearing “Hooker With A Penis” for the first time in Jeff Bellew’s truck when the LP came out earlier than the CD - he put it to tape and we listened with our mouths open as about 5 minutes of pure Poetic Justice erupted from the speakers. (more on that later)
When the CD came out I stopped everything, got it home and went directly to my room. Even as an (almost) grown man in his mid-20’s, I didn’t want anyone interrupting me while I was listening to it - headphones on - from start to finish. I probably listened to nothing else for a solid month or two. There was just so much going on that you couldn’t just listen to the album, pick out the single and tire of it immediately. From the mix - layers and layers of power and melody - to the music - brutal, intricate, melodic, powerful, etc. In my mind it was the perfect Hard Rock album, my generation’s “important” Hard Rock album.

Then, the critics got hold of it.

Back then - a million years ago, when people still bought magazines - I used to check out what Rolling Stone and SPIN had to say about anything that I was into. They were the Authorities. I was stoked when a band I’d already known about was on the verge of success - it was like a nice big, “I Told Ya So.” ÆNIMA was great, all of my friends and I knew it was great, and we were looking to tell the world once again: “Told ya.”
I opened Rolling Stone Magazine and this is what I read:

Noise as purgative: Tool shove their iron-spike riffing and shock-therapy polemics right up the claustrophobic dead end of so-called alternative metal in the name of a greater metaphysical glory – something along the fuzzy lines of Jungian cyberoccultism. That’s all very admirable and even a bit impressive; anyone who tries to elevate heavy music above cock-rock clown time is to be encouraged. Still, the best parts of Ænima come when Tool just let the music rip and dip with the broiling, avant-metal ferocity of Led Zeppelin’s Presence. Also, let us call a moratorium on concept CDs that come with lightweight “Intermission” instrumental tracks. If you need to take a piss in the middle of the record, just hit the pause button.

Now… what this doesn’t show is the fact that it got 1 out of whatever they were giving - I honestly forget because I immediately dismissed anything this magazine had to say about hard music from the moment I read the last line of the review. It was such a slap in the face: You’re jocking artists like LIVE, BUSH, R.E.M., Hole and… SON VOLT(???) and you’ve just treated this album as self-indulgent Prog-Rock, or to be more specific “taking a piss”??? (Plus: Britishisms? Seriously?) Good grief, this Fricke guy strikes me as one of those dudes who talks like he’s in Oasis but lives in Ohio. (BTW: if you can find the SPIN magazine review of this very same album, you’ll find an even more brutal and dismissive splooge of snobbery) Hey millionaires! You suck!

Wouldn’t be the first time anyone has said that. Hmm, wonder why they jock Led Zeppelin all the time now? Whatever, different subject…

ÆNIMA was new. New, in an age of not much new; new, meaning fresh, original and (sometimes in this case, disturbing, but ultimately) NEW.
Songs like the aforementioned “Hooker…” were a new take on the relationship between band and fan - and the brutal extension of what really goes through the mind of someone who’s just had some ignorant little shit tell them they’d sold out; the title track was a Shane Lechler kick to the groin for any person who really believed that their skewed self-image were actually a thing of value. “Stinkfist” (or, more comfortably, “Track #1″) was social commentary on the way we as a society have become desensitized by over-stimulated media blitzing… I think. Okay, I hope; “Eulogy” was about as final a coffin nail on the Martyred Hero complex as one could imagine. Throughout the album, artwork to sound bites, there was dry, hard as nails gallows-humor to keep it moving: Images of California sinking into the sea as punishment for it’s sins by way of an album cover that could have come out of a CrackerJack box; tributes to the late Bill Hicks; and lyrics, lyrics, lyrics. From unusual metaphors to clever word plays (Album Title: ÆNIMA. Title track: ÆNEMA) this album goes to great lengths to give the listener something to figure out. And the melody? There’s a moment on the song “Jimmy” that shows you just how amazing this guy’s voice is - should shed some light on why someone like Tricky, another artist who was actually doing something new around that time, said, “I wish I had a voice like the guy of Tool.”
At that time, who in Hard Rock was writing at this depth? No one. Maybe… Trent Reznor? The lyrics at times were both revealing & vulnerable (”Jimmy,” “Third Eye”) and sarcastic social commentary (”Stinkfist,” title track, “Hooker”). Every once in a while just plain… batty. “46 & 2″ is still my favorite song off the album but I’ve never taken it too seriously - it’s just a great song. And that bass line…
That’s the other thing: No one out there was doing the musical calculus that these guys were. Rage Against the Machine had all kinds of spitfire and venom, and while musically they were superior to most every other “Hard Rock” band out there, Tool was doing bizarre time signatures and layered compositions that brought to mind less Led Zeppelin and more… Peter Gabriel? (I remember hearing the David Bottrill would be taking Sylvia Massy’s place on the album… not sure if he acted as engineer or more, but the difference in production between this and the first two releases was night and day.)

The album opened up options for Hard Rock music in general - people saw that art didn’t have to be sacrificed in order to have force. (although, again: Jane’s kinda already started that ball rolling…) Essentially, ÆNIMA gave Hard Rock fans and musicians an option to be more than just meatheads.
No one told me these things… they’re just the conclusions I’ve drawn after years of listening to these songs, drawing them in and working out the artistic interpretations that were available to me. The point is… to say this album merely “elevated c#@%-rock” is a gross understatement. The album has depth that only the truly devoted listener knows is there - to pan this disc as an average Hard Rock album that simply needs to let the band do its thing is just… seriously incomplete in it’s evaluation of the album in question. There is power, imagery - some disturbing, some simply poignant - here that the “cursory” listen will not allow a full appreciation of.

This might just be what happens when you review something as a job - you’re over it, you give it a quick once over and move on. Maybe it’s what happens when a Jazz guy has to review a Rock album.
Or maybe it’s just what happens when someone who has never done this, is given a job telling those who have done this… how to do this.

“Those who can’t do teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.”
— Woody Allen