*Editor's Note: I didn't review this album upon its release, because I didn't want to. But as the year wore on, my thoughts about the record became harder to ignore, so while many other outlets are proclaiming it to be one of the best albums of the year, I will serve as a counterweight.*
I still remember the first time I heard "Schism". It was something completely different from everything else that existed in modern rock, and it somehow managed to be weird in a way that was engaging and exciting. In fact, most of "Lateralus" achieved that balance. It was an experience, in both ways you can use that term. It had to be heard to be understood, but it was also a trying test of one's patience and willingness to put up with musical bullshit. And that sums up all of Tool's career, as best I can say it. Tool have a unique sound, an unquestionable vision for what they want their music to be, and they also are serial purveyors of bullshit.
The last thirteen years have been all the illustration of that we will ever need. For thirteen years, they made excuses for why they couldn't put out another record. First they were taking a break from the touring cycle. Then they were mired in a lawsuit that prevented music from being recorded. Then they needed years to come up with their masterpiece. And when all was said and done, thirteen years of waiting got us what, exactly? It got us another generic Tool record.
I was not looking forward to hearing what Tool came up with, not after the hype started. Waiting thirteen years was bad enough. I don't know how any album can live up to the expectations that come with being away longer than The Beatles or Led Zeppelin were together. If they could create so much amazing music in ten years, Tool's record would have to be the greatest thing ever to justify the amount of time spent on it. But it was more than that. When the band started talking about the number seven, and how it was laced through every facet of the record, I knew we were in trouble. And when the track listing came out, and every main song was over ten minutes, I knew the record would be unbearable. And when the cover was released, and the great artists who put such care into the visual aspect of their product gave us what looked like a bad MS Paint image, I knew Tool didn't give a damn anymore.
I was right.
The biggest fault in "Fear Inoculum" is Tool buying into their own hype. Throughout the record, they play the standard Tool riffs over and over, they grow more drawn-out than ever before, and they lean-in to their worst tendencies. Let's start with the number seven.
Many of the songs are written in seven time. While that might be a factoid to mention paragraphs down a description, the band put that concept to the forefront. They learned that fans found it fascinating when they wrote a song in the Fibonacci sequence, and so they used numbers as a crutch. Their music didn't need to be interesting; it was in seven! What they don't understand, what most progressive bands don't understand, is that the average listener can't hear that. Most people who put on a record can't count a time signature, so all the effort they put into writing riffs that work in batches of seven is lost on us. And when the biggest selling point you can make for your record is that it's more interesting if you do the math of how the notes fall, you're admitting your record is terrible. If the music was good, it wouldn't matter what time signature it happened to be in.
But the aspect that truly sunk "Fear Inoculum" is the over-bloated hubris of the whole thing. The band felt like they needed to give us the maximum, and by doing so, they exposed how little they had left in the tank. With so many long songs that add up to an ungodly long album, there simply aren't enough good ideas in any of these tracks to justify the amount of time they are wasting. The first single should have told us this. It was ten minutes long, but spent several minutes building up, noodled for no reason, and never reached a crescendo. It had the structure and creativity of a four minute song, but went on more than twice that length, simply for the sake of doing so. As I mentioned before, it was bullshit.
Over the course of the entire record, there wasn't a single melody line, and perhaps only two riffs, that were truly interesting. Adam Jones chugged away in odd times, but without any riffs like "Schism", or that one in "The Grudge" (you know which one I mean). It was all flat, tired, and like a parody of Tool. Maynard James Keenan was no better, delivering a performance that was both passionless and toothless. His voice was there, but could easily be missed, given how few of his lines were worth remembering. These songs were Tool putting down whatever ideas they had in their heads, repeating them while they hoped something else would come to mind, and not caring to quit when they realized they didn't want to be Tool anymore.
I would speculate they got so used to being able to tour and have a career without the need to obsess over making new art that the process of doing so no longer appealed to them. This record feels half-assed, and if in fact they were using their full ass, it's all the more damning. After so many years away, Tool has become a brand, and adhering to a self-contained structure seems to go against everything Tool was supposed to be. Or maybe they're just out of ideas. I might be trying to give them an excuse for wasting so much of my time listening to this flaccid attempt to be important.
Whatever the case, Tool might be getting accolades from all corners for this album, but there's no reason for it. Tool used to make good records, but this sure as hell isn't one of them. Maybe this was all one long con, a performance piece to see if people would convince themselves any piece of crap was good, just so they didn't have to admit they spent a decade of their lives holding out hope for a miracle that was never going to come.
I'm not going to lie to you. I didn't do that, and I can say "Fear Inoculum" is terrible.
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