Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Tool
Label: ZOO entertainment / Volcano Records / BMG Music
Release: 2001
Duration: 78:51
Rating: 5/5
Few bands have poured so much restlessness into my body and soul, so much craving for even bigger doses of rhythm and intoxicating melody, and at the very summit of my musical Olympus I can see, and am able to see, only one name that fills every gap in my worship of perfect music – the name of American progressive metallers TOOL. After a five-year wait, during which these poets of the cosmic wrestled with their then-label and found themselves practically on the brink of a final musical shutdown, the ball of legal (or rather lawyerly) tangles finally comes undone, and what sees the light of day is, in my book, one of the greatest records of the turn of the millennium – the album Lateralus.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRSLmlFqExU
The run-up to the release was full of misdirection and thoroughly Tool-style enigma. An album called Systema Encéphale was on the cards, then came the fight with the greedy global web and Napster’s windmills, which, let’s be honest, took the wind out of every artist’s passion for visual finishing touches and for putting more work into album sleeves and similar relics in every music lover’s collection. Tool proved they have a wealth of ideas and arguments that make it utterly pointless to reach for pathetic surrogates, cold digital files and disrespectful-to-artists forms of worldwide theft. The warped mentality of a whole generation of modern-day pirates has crippled plenty, and Maynard loudly pointed out that “there’s a lot of other industry out there that deserves to be destroyed. The ones MP3s hurt aren’t so much the big record companies and corporations, but the artists and performers, people who are trying to write new music”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36dI2ILZtrs
Lateralus feeds even the most demanding fan hunger. The tool of this particular treatment is a total excess when it comes to the visual direction and the phenomenally mystical design of the record, where the human being gets dissected in their auric form by original artist Alex Grey. Different translucent layers break the human body down layer by layer, and hidden in the design is the first message, in which the very meaning of God, if you will, stays veiled because of our eternal rationalizing and anchoring of meanings in our brain cortex. The second challenge, besides the excessively inspired visuals, is the music, which flows into the whole through your unprepared ear canals, and it becomes crystal clear pretty quickly that TOOL decided to dig deeper and serve us something utterly unbelievable and brutally good. There’s so much material on the record that it’s impossible to take it all in after the first listen, so Lateralus may be too big a bite to chew for the less patient, but trust me, this delicacy is something you can easily commit to for the long haul, and it has everything that will make the record “click” for you even after a decade of needless abstinence from that first listen. We can start with the meter, with the rhythm that toys with your senses from the opening track The Grudge on. It’s a song in which the radioactive core glows up gradually and meanings burn out slowly. A song about resentment and smoldering hatred, it fans itself up hesitantly, only to erupt after the opening crumbling into the full scream of an unstoppable, almost godlike rage. The phenomenal interplay of Danny’s incredible drums, saturated with percussion, is greased by the transcendent caressing of Justin Chancellor’s bass strings and the floating guitars of Adam Jones, all refined by Maynard’s mantra “Clutch it like a cornerstone / Otherwise it all comes down / Justify denials and / Grip ’em to the lonesome end / Clutch it like a cornerstone / Otherwise it all comes down / Terrified of being wrong / Ultimatum prison cell / Saturn ascends / Choose one or ten / Hang on or be / Humbled again / Humbled again.” The main axis of the action and the whole show is the charismatic frontman, who plants beauty in your mind with either brutal aggression or intoxicating sweetness. After the intro of Eon Blue Apocalypse, the mental ascent along the parabola of pleasure continues. The Patient is an ode to surrender and God-fearing worship of the incomprehensible, and after dropping to their knees, the burning believer asks why they’ve been forgotten and why they can’t hear the resounding echo of the divine. “If there were no rewards to reap / No loving embrace to see me through / This tedious path I’ve chosen here / I certainly would’ve walked away / By now”. Next comes the Buddhist Mantra, which, like an ominous call for the nihilistic annihilation of everything rational, weaves the element of suspense back in, and then you get stabbed by another incredible bass brilliance in the song Schism. “There was a time that the pieces fit / But I watched them fall away / Mildewed and smouldering / Strangled by our coveting / I’ve done the math enough to know / The dangers of our second guessing / Doomed to crumble unless we grow / And strengthen our communication”. The glorification of repetitively recreating dreamlike worlds breaks apart on the cliffs of sense-making, and I’m undoubtedly more of a fan of getting hypnotically strapped into the loom of TOOL, the great manipulators, through not trying too hard. Meanings seep through the pores with every word Maynard utters. “Cold silence has / A tendency to / Atrophy any / Sense of compassion / Between supposed brothers / Between supposed lovers”. Schism is the perfect eroticism of rhythm and melody, and it’s followed by the twin tracks Parabol and Parabola. First the soft touch of honeyed fingertips in the calm overture of Parabol, then Adam Jones’s refined, full, distorted guitar cuts you in half and shakes you up with one of the heavier songs on the album, where after the initial calm, loud and thundering guitars rattle your thoughts. Maynard stays composed and pours a huge amount of power and conviction into his delivery. Why are we here and what are we doing in this world? Is it chance, or a predestined existence with some deeper meaning? “This body. This body holding me. / Be my reminder here that I am not alone in / This body, this body holding me, feeling eternal all this pain is an illusion,” are words that say it all. We seek comfort and a magical plaster for our soul, which is trapped in a body, and that body, soaked in pain and feeling, is merely a capsule for worldly expression. In the illusion of existence, tracks get pressed into the sand under our feet so that we might, for a moment at least, stop and look for answers to our questions about eternity. The body is mortal and doomed to extinction with the first worldly breath. It’s the soul that is immortal. Less comforting is the follow-up, the phenomenal and brutally loud Ticks & Leeches. “Suck and suck. Suckin up all you can suckin up all you can suck. / Workin up under my patience like a little tick. / Fat little parasite. Suck me dry. / My blood is bruised and borrowed. You thieving bastards. / You have turned my blood cold and bitter, / beat my compassion black and blue” are words that choke and suck out the positivity in the most refined way. Maynard settles scores with the bloodsuckers at his label and pours a perfect dose of ominous excellence into your ears. Next up is the title track, well, almost the title track, Lateralis. As many well-informed and in-depth sources tell us, it’s written following the principles of the Fibonacci sequence, i.e. total mathematization by the pattern 1,1,2,3,5,8. The rhythm creeps into the cracks of a furrowed heart with a refined string of words and sounds. A song that touches on human passions, desire, the eternal urge to break through and take another step forward. Maynard is the needle on the scale, singing out mathematical structures and blurred images of mystical meanings. “Black then white are all i see in my infancy. / red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me. / lets me see. / as below, so above and beyond, I imagine / drawn beyond the lines of reason. / Push the envelope. Watch it bend.” The transcendence of an exalted moment that forces us to surpass ourselves and the world in a self-destructive way, where we live under the illusion that this spiral of endless completion can stretch on without limit, while we humans only appear to be placed closer to the gods. “I embrace my desire to / feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow / to feel inspired to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, / to bathe in the fountain, / to swing on the spiral / to swing on the spiral / to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human” sings Maynard and spins us into a new cycle of hellish awakening. The song is a perfect reflection of instinct and total soul-plundering, in which tribal drum rhythms bring you into contact with yourself. Disposition calms the passions with a suspense of noise, only to be followed by the renewed reflective provocation of the track Reflection. The open, wide-eyed gaze of curious seekers of the perfect light of truth is blinded by the meaning they’ve seen, and the person who climbed the steep slopes of Plato’s cave to follow the inner call for (self-)salvation is nearing the cathartic moment of the total end. “So crucify the ego before it’s far too late / To leave behind this place so negative and blind and cynical / And you will come to find that we are all one mind / Capable of all that’s imagined and all conceivable / Just let the light touch you and let the words spill thorough / Just let them pass right through, bringing out our hope and reason./ before we pine away.” The pressure on your shoulders holds steady through the closing act of Triad, and after the electrified buzzing of God’s voice fades out with Faaip De Oiad, a recording of a radio show where a man comes on the air who supposedly escaped from the authorities that are shoving the truths of the infamous Area 51 into “strictly confidential” drawers. The song title is written in the language of angels, in Enochian, in which medieval seers described their visions of the divine.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1HbX8w0Djw
And that’s what we get in every single moment of this incredible album. TOOL have unfurled their spiral of evolution and taken an incredible step forward from their predecessor, the album Aenima. Lateralus has so many spectacular layers and mental challenges that it could without doubt be placed at the very peak of both TOOL’s output and the musical genius of the early 21st century. There’s no half-assing it and no hollow concepts. There’s no exaggeration, and there are no words that could fully capture every meaning of this record or describe the brutal act of a new spiritual ascension. Above all, there’s no material with which to fittingly immortalize the monumental greatness of an album that leaves you alone in the solitude of your own existence, where all you can do is count the moments of ecstatic trembling at the feeling of the pure Here and Now. Lateralus is definitely made for repeated, deep listening!
Lineup
Danny Carey – drums
Justin Chancellor – bass
Maynard James Keenan – vocals
Adam Jones – guitar
Production
David Bottrill & Tool
Tracklist
1. The Grudge
2. Eon Blue Apocalypse
3. The Patient
4. Mantra
5. Schism
6. Parabol
7. Parabola
8. Ticks & Leeches
9. Lateralus
10. Disposition
11. Reflection
12. Triad
13. Faaip De Oiad
