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My advice to anyone buying Aenema, the latest album from Tool, is simple. When you buy the album, buy a set of headphones - good ones. Don't listen to it in your car on the way home, don't listen to it before you go back to work or wherever - just wait until you get home, lock yourself away in a room, get the materials you need to sustain your existence for a few hours, put on the headphones and strap yourself in.
One of the first things you'll notice in the liner notes of the album is a portrait of the late comedian Bill Hicks. I saw Hicks live a few times during his career and the parallels between his comedy and Tool's musical and lyrical style are uncanny. Hicks could leave you bowled over with laughter one minute and genuinely disturbed the next with his biting wit towards the world around him. Nothing was sacred to him, and the same can be said of Tool.
The sound of the album is vastly different from that of Undertow, Tool's now three years-old first LP. Undertow was criticized by some as being almost commercial, a label that seemed to stick in some circles with the success of the singles for "Sober" and "Prison Sex". But when you really stopped to listen to the album, you realized that commercialism had nothing to do with the equation at all. Where Tool separated itself from the rest of the alternative / metal / whatever-the-hell-it-is-this-week genre on Undertow and again on Aenema is their songwriting - which is about as far from commercial as you can get. Let's be honest: Does the line "I have found some kind of temporary sanity in this shit blood and cum on my hands" (from "Prison Sex") sound commercial to you?
There are some instances where Tool's musical approach to their material isn't completely original. The garbled vocals on "Eulogy", for instance, are a trick employed quite a few times by bands ranging from Ministry to Stone Temple Pilots. But even though the tricks aren't always completely original (and you find me ten different albums released these days that are completely original, and I'll crawl through glass to worship at your feet), Tool's approach is to put a new twist on them. And more often than not, that twist is provided through the vocals of Maynard James Keenan.
Keenan's vocals can at times be soul-wrenching in their tortured agony and soul-crushing in their rage, and it is that diversity that makes Aenema more of a trip through a bands mind and soul than the usual album. This is a personal album in every sense of the word, with the band paying homage to their friend Hicks and taking shots at L. Ron Hubbard, fans who accuse them of selling out, and anyone else who gets in their way.
Bottom line is this: no matter what you thought of Undertow, or what you think of the loosely-defined genre that Tool is placed in (the alternative/metal/whatever genre I spoke of above), Aenema is an incredible album. It has more soul and strength than the majority of the releases from any genre this year combined, and will leave you feeling worn out at its conclusion. You'll go places, thats for damn sure - but some of those places aren't too nice at all.
