Tool
Fear Inoculum

A record awaited for thirteen years. But in the end, it was ruined by... haste. Am I exaggerating? Just a bit. Put all the cautious quotation marks you want, but let's not pretend not to see reality. Fear Inoculum is poorly assembled, it almost sounds like instrumental tracks with a guy passing by who decides to try singing over them. I continue to exaggerate because waiting all this time to end up with such a "raw" work is truly paradoxical.

Raw like a just-chiseled statue, as if Manzoni had never washed his clothes in the Arno. It almost feels like a "good enough on the first try" regarding the alchemy between music and vocals. All of this results from a questionable creative method and the reverberation of crossed selfish choices. It might have gone something like this: the three of them constructed these behemoths with extreme slowness, tracks over ten minutes long, very bland, hypnotic, jams with very few edges to cling to. Maynard waited, simmering a bit of anger, cursing inside among harvests, bottles, and parallel musical projects. At a certain point, for Jones, the music was done, while Keenan said he hesitated to even call it that (we're in 2016). Another couple of years passed, Keenan did other things, and when he finally had the pieces in front of him, he might have cursed again. But after so much time, the desire to commit deeply, the hunger for music, and even the communicative urgency had vanished.

So, he hastily put the lyrics together because he really couldn't bear the waiting any longer. He could have wracked his brains to counter the flood of notes, could have roared louder than the strings. But what was the point? Too much to listen to? Let's leave room for the music. He might have done it partly out of laziness and revenge, partly from a lack of inspiration. However, on tracks this long, these succinct lyrics feel confining, to use an understatement. Such minimalist and timid singing does not do justice to the name it represents. And here emerges the real problem of the album, which also casts a clearer light on the quality of the previous ones. Without the dense counterpoint of the vocals, Tool's music loses a lot.

They are not a "traditional" prog band, let's be clear, and the (few) predominantly instrumental tracks are more like hypnotic sessions, certainly not central to the albums. I think, for example, of the final drift of the album Lateralus, which indeed is a psychedelic digression, the heart is certainly elsewhere. Here the lyrics adapt to the expanded structure of the pieces (out of necessity or lack of desire to change the arrangements, meaning asking others to do it), Keenan focuses on clean vocals, on ethereal melodies, which do not virtuously collide with the music and do not make it stand out through contrast. Instead, they add opacity.

Tool's music worked because of the sharpness it created with MJK's vocal evolutions, the rhythmic games, the guitar swerves, the bass propulsion were in constant dialogue with the devil who invented everything. And it worked because it was the voice that gave soul to those extraordinary but cold architectures, incapable of communicating if not through Jimmy's "metaphysical" interpretation. Meticulously oiled gears entwined with their philosophical, existential, narrative, personal counterpart.

Now that the words thin out, slow down, become less urgent and aggressive, the entire musical cathedral suffers. Which for many will be admirable, but at these speeds, in my opinion, becomes really cloying, it is the sound of Tool turned dinosaurs, almost unlistenable. There are no real cusps to give flavor, a great masturbation of skill without grip on the listener. Some reiterations of almost unchanged riffs for long seconds (but maybe minutes) cannot help but have a strong nursing home rock aftertaste. Everything flows as in a flabby show, certainly well-groomed, without smudges but hardly ever in focus. One gets lost in the care of an architecture that works only in the egotistical dreams of individual musicians. Emblematic is the useless "Chocolate Chip Trip," which does not shy away from repeating a synth motif for five minutes, just to allow Carey to lay down the hammer.

Tool's music in its canonical dissection does not speak for itself, it is an ideal support to give strength to a voice. It is math, numbers, geometries, which do not have their own expressive autonomy. The theme of the album for Adam Jones was supposed to be seven because there were several songs with that number in the timings. This should give an idea of the almost robotic genius, but also the emotional lack of the guitarist's and his two comrades' approach. Then came Maynard, who had a concept centered on the number seven. We will see if over time at least the words tell us something.

I said that the musical geometries of the diabolical trio are not self-sufficient. Jones might know this, and in one of the less unfortunate episodes of the album he devotes himself to a long solo, well substituting the voice in "7empest." It is at least an emotional movement, an adrenaline rush in a context where one feels comfortably numb.

These are all tracks that could have been trimmed by a third or half and made more intense with a narrowing of the gaps that would have imposed more accurate work of intertwining with the texts. It was necessary to sit there and finely trim all the excrescences and make the vocalizations, rolls, solos, pulsations align. Instead, this feels like a movie before the final cut, when the vanity of the too-talented director makes him believe he cannot go below four hours. Then someone comes and works with machete and scalpel. This is Fear Inoculum, an exaggeratedly long-winded and self-loving director's cut.