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 title: Rhythm section makes Tool startling
author: Gijsbert Kramer
Rhythm section makes Tool Startling

Tool: Lateralus. Vulcano/Zomba.

Tool seems to be the sole surviving band from the heavy music scene 
that started off in the early nineties, that still tries to 
scrutinise the boundaries of modern day rock.  For artistically we 
don’t have to expect much more from Korn and Limb Bizkit.
Sure, there are still The Deftones, but even their ingenious 
metalraps start to look pale compared by the innovating new Tool 
album. Just like the so-called renewing post rock from the likes of 
Mogwai is shattered by Lateralus.  
Tool may have kept us waiting for more than four years, the impact 
made by Lateralus is a fact nonetheless. For almost eighty minutes, 
Tool grabs you by the balls. They don’t use songs or melodies. There 
are no songs. And still. Tool brings forth complex and spinned out 
pieces of music with many shift changes in tempo. This music could 
easily be confused with old-fashioned symphonic rock if Tool had a 
keyboard tiger like Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman on the pay-list.
But luckily, they haven’t. Tool uses the old guitar-bass-drums idiom, 
and with that it goes much further than any contemporary rock band. 
When in the past Tool liked to give demonstrations in virtuosity, 
this time round all ostentatious showing of musical capability is 
left behind. 
Most startling and also renewing is the way the rhythm section sets 
to work. But even the prolix ensemble playing of Justin Chancellor on 
bass and Danny Carey on drums is in the often more than 10 minutes 
lasting pieces continuously extraordinarily exciting.
Guitar and voice sound just a bit too metal. Singer Maynard James 
Keenan’s metal scream sounds just a bit too pathetic.  While the 
guitar-sound also resembles too much the sound of Metallica during 
the eighties. 
This and the very affected cryptic lyrics make it difficult to really 
love Lateralus. The admiration for the album however is intact. 
Seldom an album is that overwhelming.

Posted to t.d.n: 05/27/01 11:28:17