Publication: The Melbourne Age
Date: November 1, 1996
Transcribed by Daniel Steadman (flood@zx.net.au)
Well, it's the best review I've read.. author: Andrew Masterson Aenima - Tool Califorian quartet Tool have succeeded on this album in producing some of the most profoundly disturbing music ever committed to disc. This is not a negative observation; quite the opposite. A strong Gothic thread runs through the solid guitar, bass and drum compositions, a darkness of vision and, above all, a sense of bleak inevitability that owes more to the mystical visions of Aleister Crowley, W.B. Yeats and John Milton than the Hammer Horro trademarks that usually suffuse the genre. Tool songs are sprawling, creeping creatures that balance power-chord thumpings with long quiet passages, often edgy and percussive, topped with vocals that switch from distant, sad repetitions (as in the mournful Eulogy) to the screams of the damned (as in the final track, Third Eye). It is usually the quieter passages that succeed in producing a disconcerting unease - simultaneously compelling and uncomfortable. There is little here to suit commercial radio format and nothing remotely resembling a love song. Tool manage to evoke the nameless fears that lie at the centre of the soul, the half-formed monsters and demons that prowl in the unconscious and which the light of reason can never quite illuminate.