TOOL Live in Zagreb

 Tool are extravagance incarnate. Tool are a provocation for the eyes and ears, a balm for the soul of every fan of alternative sounds who’s after a balance of sensuality, hidden brutality, sarcasm and philosophical introspection into the very core of existence, and for anyone who thinks avant-garde art is reason enough to go to a show. The reason for keeping a closer eye on the gig scene right next door was served up a few months earlier, when the whispers got louder and more frequent that the American quartet was planning to visit us in September. A pretty big deal. For the promoters, and for all the gourmands who last headed to Zagreb when Pearl Jam took over the stage. And just a year later, the tour and the epic promotion of their latest album 10.000 Days brought the Los Angeles heavyweights to the Croatian capital …

Tuesday, September 4th arrived. The road, wrapped in rain and autumn chill, unfolded slowly in front of my friend’s car wheels. Way too slowly for three enthusiasts who, like a dozen other Slovenian devotees, had set off on a pilgrimage to Zagreb. The organizers had moved this spectacle from the open-air venue where we’d been able to catch Korn a month earlier, the Šalata sports complex, into the covered sports hall of Dom Sportova. Thank God. No need to brave the unfriendly weather, and the sound would be way better too. After a little over two hours of epic travel across the Schengen border line and a few minor hiccups, we finally made it. In front of the hall the youngsters were already packed together, gathering at the entrance. The security guys were pretty strict this time. No cameras. No backpacks or bags of any kind either. After we’d dumped all the extra kilos of travel baggage and clothing at the rather cramped but very well-organized cloakroom, it was time for one last beer and a look at the stalls with CDs, DVDs, shirts and other TOOL souvenirs. The show was supposed to start at nine. After last year’s concert, which I caught in Bologna and shortly after that in Jesolo, I knew it would kick off right on schedule, so we had to grab the best spot in the hall as soon as possible. The floor was packed to the last corner, but up in the stands you could get even a little closer to the stage.

The clock struck nine. The hall went dark and the silhouettes of the alternative shamans of TOOL shuffled onto the stage. The roaring applause and cheers of a crowd of roughly six thousand grew by the second. Danny Carey came out first and sat down behind his huge drum kit. Right behind him, the others took their places: the band’s artistic director and visuals guru, guitarist Adam Jones, and the long-haired bassist Justin Cancellor. Crystal-clear rhythms of the opening song, Jambi, poured out of the speakers. The big screens of the backdrop visuals burst into flames, and in front of them you could spot the band’s frontman – singer Maynard James Keenan, who’d pulled a cowboy hat down over his head for tonight’s occasion. “Here from the king’s mountain view / Here from the wild dream come true / Feast like a sultan I do / On treasures / And flesh, never few”. The crowd’s first elemental switch to a higher level was done. No compromise. No needless wasting of excess energy. From the very first bars you could feel and taste a dense, emotion-soaked hall. After a few minutes of musical perfection, marred only slightly by Maynard’s vocals being a touch too quiet, the song wrapped up in a climax of blood-thick distortion, phenomenal drum fills and bass lines with no shortage of balls. After a short break following the first song, which the audience greeted with a roar like a beast hungry for intense sexual satisfaction, the visuals in the background announced the first trip back to the “golden days” of the phenomenal album Ænima, the single ‘Stinkfist’, which TOOL reworked a bit this time. Mainly stretched out, but not a single second of the song sounded superfluous. This was a display of vehemence, stage power and calculated revelry. Maynard faces the crowd head-on, and the whole setup, the performers on stage and the crowd loudly singing the verses of the track, can only be described as one inseparable whole. “Show me that you love me and that we belong together / Shoulder deep within the borderline / Relax, turn around and take my hand.” Any persuasion is unnecessary. Zagreb was eating out of the band’s hand, exactly as predictable and expected. After the first single comes another song from the same album. ’46&2′. A weave of illusions and delusions. A weave of angels and demons. The essence of introspection is the climb to a higher evolutionary plateau of existence. After a short trip into the past, TOOL decided to take a completely new direction. For a year and a half now they’ve been presenting the fruit of their latest mental effort. The album 10.000 Days is a worthy successor to the earlier records, but the songs are maybe served up a bit too much on a plate. Maybe that’s because I started breathing and living them from the very day the album came out. The tendentiousness of the latest album doesn’t move me the way the gems of the past do. And so what followed was, more or less, a classroom lesson in the philosophy of 10.000 Days. ‘Schism’ flows into ‘Rosetta’ and the fractals of consciousness melt away in the psychedelia of audiovisual bombardment par excellence. The first cold shower, which gave me a hunch that maybe not everything that glitters is gold, came in the epically long ‘Vicarious’. It was really just a jam session, during which Maynard could slip backstage for a little rest. I was more taken by the bass line, with which Cancellor filled the vaults of the hall to the point of pain, while quite a few eyes were glued to Carey’s corner, since many connoisseurs of drumming’s secrets consider him one of the best drummers in rock today. The transitions he strings together with jazzy subtlety and rock’s metronomic precision, as if it were nothing, sound like play. It wouldn’t work if the people firing off these bursts of sound didn’t believe in what they do, with a wholeheartedness and manic faith bordering on artistic madness. Still, the ending of the track was much more like an art experiment, where you in the hall are the lab test subjects and the band is a foursome of mad scientists tuning frequencies to see how far they can go. This time, going off stage for five whole minutes of squealing effects was a bit too far. They’re stealing time and banking minutes so they can bail sooner, I heard someone behind me say. I almost expected that to be it and that they wouldn’t come back. But they did, and carried on with a double dip into the past. By that I mean that they ground out, brilliantly but with the energy in the zone of conscious reserve, ‘Flood’, which I heard at one of their shows for the first time, and the gem of the album Lateralus, the song ‘Lateralus’. “I embrace my desire to / 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.” Fragility and humanity in a fight with the divine. Plenty of people felt another surge and a longing for endless transcendence, but this time there was none to be had, because after the song Maynard breathed something like a farewell into the mic, promising they’d be back, and then TOOL played one last track – ‘Vicarious’ – and left Zagreb after only an hour and a half of show.

My feelings about what I’d seen were mixed – on one hand a craving for more and the awareness that the show could have been longer, on the other a feeling I’d never had after a TOOL gig before: musically speaking, this was the closest to perfection yet. What bugs me is the routine and Mr. Maynard’s rock-star posturing, deciding on a whim when enough is enough. Have a look at the attached setlist and at the fact that we should have seen one more song for the show to feel like a complete whole. TOOL served up a sweet-and-sour glaze of the most that today’s alternative can offer you. I think they’ve been on tour a little too long and it’s time for a short break from the stage – so we don’t get sick of them. You know how it is: if you eat roast every day, it’s nothing special anymore, and come the holidays you’ll struggle to find anything that brings you to gourmet ecstasy. On the other hand, it’s worth praising the exemplary organization and the phenomenal crowd, who gave the show just the right amount of sweat, adrenaline and ecstasy. And that’s one more reason why next time, say next month when Muse come to Zagreb, there won’t be many hesitating and not reserving their spot in front of the Zagreb stage.