My campus paper (Penn State) had a review of the new album in today's paper.
There are several misconceptions in the article, including lyrical errors,
but all in all it was pretty decent I believe.

This isn't in the text of the article, but above it in graphical form is
"Music Review- Aenima by Tool : A".
This may not sound impressive at first, but my paper does NOT give A's. At all.
By the way, there's the 4x5 inch pic of them and the "dog" (I can't for the
life of me figure out how to spell chiwawa :)" right next to the article....


>From "The Daily Collegian"  vol 97, no 75, Oct 25th 1996 page 17

                            "Tool's Aenima: More songs
                            about paranoia and death"

                            Twisted new Tool album clocks in
                            over an hour of tormented dreams and
                            paranoid fantasies.

                            By DAVID ANDREWS
                            Collegian Arts Writer

                            
Tool does not simply "return" to the music world. After three years of
silence, like a stasis in a murky swamp, Tool is a hand that reaches
through the muck, pulling down the unsuspecting into its dark universe far
beneath the surface of the conventional music world. 

On this trip into the vortex, Tool offers the most exhaustive journey yet
through their world. In a mere 77 minutes, =92nima fleshes out all of
Tool's favorite topics, dealing with a cycle of power, technology,
paranoia and the death of the human spirit. 

Like Undertow, =92nima often sounds like a concept album, partly because
the band's very sound is conceptual. The lyrics merely reinforce a drama
that the sounds depict, with vocals of somber broodings as the signature
guitars lie in wait in the background. 

This "down" time offers the gloomy perspective of a man struggling to
survive the complexities of the world with his humanity intact. The "main
character" deals with various influences that eventually meld into cogs of
society, including technology, religion and politics. 

"Eulogy" can perhaps be seen as the thesis of the album, fully describing
such a struggle. "He had a lot to say," it begins, with quiet despair over
a man who has died, then climaxing with signature guitars and the
Orwellian rant of "Don't you step out of line." 

This big brother system in place throughout the album, with eerie sounds
of electric waves in "Ions" and rhythms of "Die Eier Von Satan," which
sounds like a hydraulic press. The song diverges briefly from the usual
Tool sound, show= ing experimentation in an apparent homage to
Einst=81rzende Neubauten, a German prototype to similarly revolutionary
music. 

The music eventually returns to the individual, who fights this dystopia
through anger, drug use, apathy and submission.  Climaxes come one after
the other, an effect which may grate on those with weak stomachs as they
await the end of an assault that never seems to stop. 

But by the time "=92nima" is reached, every outlet of fighting has been
exhausted, leaving the individual only with apathy. "The only way to
listen is to brush it all away," he says with a cry that seems to come
from an abandoned corner. 

The final cry comes in "Third Eye." But it is not an appeal to the
hopeful, but rather a last gasp. The only hope remaining is that Tool's
world is a fiction, a world where all that remains of the individual is a
frightened echo as the wheel of society rolls us asunder. 





http://www.personal.psu.edu/~jvm113

"Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functionung.
A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing."

-Tool