VISCERAL VENOM: The smell of Maynard James Keenan’s enmity is part of the Tool mystique. |
Maynard James Keenan, to borrow an observation made about the young William Burroughs, has the face of a sheep-killing dog — taut, starved, bleakly symmetrical, with an underhang of menace. He sings in a voice like wire running off a spool. He’s into sodomy and holiness. And the new Tool CD, 10,000 Days (Volcano), comes with a pair of stereoscopic lenses through which to peer at the trippy artwork. (If you do this, in the cloister of your bedroom or study, I guarantee you will hear distant, mocking laughter.) What a wacky, wacky band.And what a mighty one, too. They sold out their May 21 Orpheum show in 32 seconds, and they wouldn’t give your fun-loving Phoenix an interview, the bastards. Then again, why should they? They don’t need us. Tool long ago achieved a state of glimmering shadow renown, in which we are always lurkingly aware, as if cursed, of their existence and potency. They survived grunge, Lollapalooza, new metal, and whatever the last thing was that happened. Silence and absence now conspire in their favor. Sparse press; forbidding æsthetics; an album every five years or so, beamed directly into the pineal gland of their enthralled audience; mega, mega sales. Undertow (1993) went double platinum; the last album, Lateralus (2001), went straight to #1, and 10,000 Days just did the same, dethroning Godsmack’s IV. If I were the singer of a hack metal band, dutifully slopping out riffs ’n’ grunts for the masses only to watch Tool swing down from their velvet obscurity and cream my sales figures, I might catch myself muttering, “Dude, what the FUCK . . . ?”
Well here’s the secret: they’re wizards. “Black and white are all I see, in my infancy,” whispered Keenan urgently on the title track of Lateralus, his breath synched to the pattern of Danny Carey’s toms. “Red and yellow then came to be, reaching out to me . . . ” Black, white, yellow and red: the four main stages of the alchemical opus. In one of alchemy’s foundational texts, the Tractatus Aureus (“Golden Treatise”) attributed to Hermes Trismegistus, a vulture stands on the side of a mountain and cries, “I am the white of the black, and the red of the white and the yellow of the red, and I am very truthful.” Which is something Maynard Keenan might say (or sing). Tool are eye-deep in the great arcanum, seething with alchemical lore, the Kabala, entheogenic revelation, and God knows what else. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the release date of 10,000 Days was lined up astrologically for maximum efficacy, or that some of its time signatures are Pythagorean spells engineered to depress the market value of Godsmack.
As with Lateralus, the packaging/artwork is a collaboration between Tool’s Adam Jones — he of the dark blue guitar tone — and the visionary artist Alex Grey, founder of Manhattan’s Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. Grey is a devout acidhead who spent five years at Harvard Medical School preparing cadavers for dissection, and he has, as you might expect, a keen interest in the resolution of the mind/body dichotomy. Your typical Grey painting of the human form — male, skinless, and ablaze with inner light — is part anatomical study, part diagram of divinity. Nodes of spirit energy are mapped onto the organs and veins, and the tree of nerves is burning like Moses’s bush. The horrific 1996 acrylic-on-linen image Despair presents an immobile figure, arms crossed over his knees and head down, his brain short-circuiting into blackness while preying strands of blue-green electricity misfire through his body — a holistic portrait of clinical depression that is as accurate as an encephalogram.
Grey’s vision is Tool’s vision: they have trained their music like a weapon on the next phase in the evolution of human consciousness, the moment in which the old dualities — spirit/flesh, psyche/brain — are outlived. “Shine on forever/Shine on benevolent sun/Shine on the severed/Shine until the two become one,” implores Keenan in the new track “Jambi.” And “Right in Two” is about the “silly monkeys” who separate themselves from the All: “Where there’s one they’re bound to divide it/Right in two . . . ” Which brings us to the least attractive aspect of Tool — their higher-being scorn for the unevolved, for all of us lolling, ass-picking primates who haven’t quite got the picture yet.
