page: 
 title: Aenima review
author: Stephen Thompson

Tool
Aenima
(Zoo)
It's awfully easy to rip on Tool's silly, long-winded, self-serious 
prog-core. But listen to ænima, the follow-up to Tool's platinum-
selling breakthrough album Undertow, and you'll hear generous heaps 
of metal, hardcore, prog and rock, sprawled out on a 77-minute CD 
amid tangents like a pretty piano interlude ("Message to Harry 
Manback"), carnival noodlings ("Intermission") and a bizarro German-
language rant ("Die Eier Von Satan"). It must have taken forever to 
record and assemble ænima, just as it seems to take forever to 
actually listen to the damn thing. Critics may hate the hell out of 
it, but guess what? ænima is 77 minutes of Tool, it's anything but 
one-note, and it's exactly what the band's many fans are looking for. 
In an age of lazily slapped-together hard-music-by-numbers, ænima is 
sonically ambitious and marvelously packaged. And unless Uriah Heep 
stages a miraculous comeback, you just won't find that in this day 
and age. --Stephen Thompson 

Posted to t.d.n: 05/06/01 02:04:24