I was about 16 when I first heard of Tool. It was around the time their first album 'Undertow' had dropped. A friend from school had the album on cassette, and I was fascinated by the cover, which resembled a red-hued, holographic rib cage; intuitively, I knew this was no ordinary "metal" band. I persuaded him to let me borrow the tape so I could copy it, and my knowings were readily confirmed.
The band Tool would later become was still in formation, but this was a different type of metal. The atmosphere their music invoked was somewhere between playfully unsettling and "arty" (though not pretentious), the usual metal cliches almost entirely absent (no aggressive posturing, or cartoonish appeals to gore or the diabolical). One of the things that stood out the most was vocalist Maynard James Keenan's voice. Pretty much every fan of Tool (and Maynard's other bands) talks about his voice so I won't go into it too much, but there is a reason why it is so celebrated. The range is staggering: a smooth, serpentine croon at one moment, suddenly exploding into a spiteful, caustic yell, Keenan's tones never fail to burrow emotional contours. His voice, not so much something you hear as feel.
Around '96 I heard 'Aenima' for the first time and loved it straight away. By this point, their sound had developed even further, as had the songwriting. Keenan was on top form as always, but it was here that I really started to notice drummer Danny Carey as well. To this day, he remains one of my favourite drummers owing to his work with the band.
Fast forward about 9 years, I found myself on an internet forum (remember those?) for games, films and music. In the music folder, we would create "mixtapes", upload them to a file transfer site and post them on the forum. Other denizens would then download and critique. It was a good way of sharing and discovering new music. And it was through this that I first encountered the song 'Lateralus' by Tool from the album of the same name.
By this point, I hadn't listened to any Tool in earnest for some time, but hearing 'Lateralus' immediately reawakened my interest in the band. The song was a 9-minute epic journey that in many ways put expression to how I felt as I stood at my own spiritual crossroad. So, after playing the song a lot for many weeks, I wanted to hear the rest of the album, so I picked it up. This was around 2005, a good 4 years after the initial release.
'Lateralus' didn't grab me the way the previous two albums did on first listen. It took a few plays before the songs really galvanised, but once they did, the record opened itself up to me in a big way. Without a doubt, I consider this album to be their most complete and accomplished work. To my mind, it is a spiritual album, a work with many layers and hidden depths that I still find myself uncovering now. It came to me during a personal low point (as touched upon briefly in other entries) but was somewhat instrumental in lifting me out. That process of transformation and rebirth was long and it was painful, but it was entirely necessary, and 'Lateralus' was my companion through it all. The song 'Reflection' particularly spoke to me at that 11th hour as lyrically, it seemed to both represent where I was offered a way out of that darkness, but every song on this record has spoken to me in some way or another on this journey.
So yes, this is why I consider 'Lateralus' an all-time favourite. To me, it's more than just an album; it is a device, it is a Tool.
Tool : Lateralus
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