Tough love

Tool's Ænima rips the façades off life

by Carly Carioli

You think you know something, don't you . . . You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you rip the fronts off houses you'll find swine?

-- Joseph Cotten as the "Merry Widow Murderer" in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt

"When I mentioned Tool the other day," writes a fan on the band's semi-official Website, "a girl said to me, `I like Tool even though they're a little scary, but I think I'm just scared because I can't really understand what the guy's saying.' `No,' I assured her, `if you knew what he was talking about, you'd be much more afraid.' "

Even the most cursory glance at Tool -- at the claustrophobic, subterranean images of the video for "Sober," off their 1993 full-length debut, Undertow, or a few lines from that album's second single, "Prison Sex," or the curdled, organic-industrial strains of "Stinkfist" currently filtering through the radio -- is enough to send an icy poke down your spine. On "Prison Sex," singer Maynard James Keenan slowly unfurled a deeply unsettling tale of rape -- you got a sinking feeling as the story revealed itself piece by piece, a cycle of violation and retribution, frustration and salvation twisted up into an ache Keenan's trembling voice couldn't shake. In much the same way, you slowly realize on "Stinkfist" that all the while Keenan's reflecting on how desensitized he's become ("Constant overstimulation numbs me/And I wouldn't have it any other way"), he's also sticking his arm -- first a finger, then a knuckle, an elbow -- up someone's ass.

At a time when post-metal guitar rock has drifted toward kitsch, industrial wallows in a post-Downward Spiral rut, and the "reality" of hardcore and hip-hop is as predictable as an episode of Cops, Tool deserve their reputation as the most genuinely frightening rock band to come along this decade (maybe much longer). Their new Ænima (Zoo, out this week) reaches even further into the psycho-sexual abyss they mapped out on Undertow and their debut EP, Opiate (both Zoo) -- it's deserving of a place on the shelf alongside Clive Barker and H.R. Geiger as fascinatingly chilling art.

And like both Barker and Geiger, Tool's sonic grotesques harbor an odd, majestic beauty. The most striking development since Undertow is Keenan's stunning, Eastern-influenced vocal style -- a closer approximation to that of Sufi belter Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan than Eddie Vedder has been able to muster. When he coils it into skyward-snaking minor-key melodies -- most notably on "Pushit," a 10-minute epic built on insect-buzzing guitar drones -- he imbues the songs with a delicate, almost spiritual luminescence.

With a total of 15 tracks (nine songs linked by six ambient/instrumental interludes) and clocking in at 77 minutes, there's plenty of time on Ænima for the band to wander, develop, explore, and explode -- often in the course of the same song. Producer David Bottrill (King Crimson, Peter Gabriel) brings a primitively exotic tone to the album with the deployment of Indian stringed instruments, finger cymbals, and lingering interludes of odd percussion. But even in their most tangential explorations, they're grounded in a familiar language: the limber metallic riffing, elastic improvisations, and declarative power-chord surges made famous by the Rollins Band augmented by more melodic and abstract cinematic flourishes. Here you find an autumnal Alice in Chains break, elsewhere sturdier rhythmic phrases reminiscent of Rage Against the Machine.

So it would be easy to gloss over some of the darker themes on Ænima -- which Keenan has described as being about "change and evolution individually as well as universally." Serpentine imagery and references to Kafka-esque metamorphosis abound. On the "Forty Six and 2" (likely to be the album's next single) Keenan tries to purge himself by literally crawling out of his own skin: "I've been crawlin' on my belly . . . I've been wallowing in my own chaotic insecure delusions/I want to feel the change consume me." But then an ebullient melody subsumes the song's stabbing, angular riff and Keenan is released, reborn: "I wanna know what I've been hiding in my shadow/Change is coming/I'm shedding skin."

If Ænima is about transformation, it's also about discovery -- in both the way the songs refuse to reveal themselves without the active participation of the listener, and in Keenan's search for what's been hiding in his own shadow. Keenan has a morbid fascination with what goes on beneath the skin, with exposing what lies hidden under the surface. He's the lost soul in the "Sober" video who pries away a panel to expose a meat-sludge torrent of filth coursing through a sewer pipe, as if the industrial setting were just a façade for the bowels and clogged arteries of some massive, diseased organism. And he wants you to do some digging of your own. But ultimately it's the beauty and serenity he finds down amid the muck and meat and shit -- and what he's forced to do to balance the two -- that makes his lyrics so haunting.

One of the album's most unsettling pieces isn't even really a song -- "Message to Harry Manback" is little more than a sentimental piano melody, seagulls chattering in the background, overlaid with a death threat in broken English and Italian that sounds as if it had been pulled off an answering machine. At first, in its halting delivery, it sounds as if it could be a love poem. Until you begin to make out the words. "You know you're going to have another accident? You know I'm involved with black magic? Die. Bastard. You think you're so cool. Asshole. And if I ever see your fucking face around . . . that time I'm gonna kick your ass . . . you gonna die out of cancer, I promise. You wanna know something? Fuck you. I want your bones, mashed. Eat shit. Bastard . . . I hope someone in your family dies soon." Yeah, it's over the top, but what makes it memorable is less the threat itself, or the language, than the tone of the voice that delivers it -- the overwhelming intimacy of it, soft and close like a lover's whispered sweet nothings. In the song that follows, Keenan screams an argument at a skater kid who accuses him of selling out, but when he delivers his final epithets, he mimics the caller's voice: "Dip-shit." He might as well add, "My love . . . "

That same kind of tension is part of what's so spooky about "Pushit." Two people are locked in a desperate, fragile embrace that neither fully understands -- Keenan at first bewildered at his mistreatment ("You still love me and you push shit on me"), then coming to a rather maudlin realization ("I'm alive when you're touching me, alive when you're shoving me down"). And at the end, it's the shivering, helpless compassion in his voice as he sings the song's last words that are the most frightening: "Just remember I will always love you/Even as I tear your fucking throat away/But it will end no other way." And the same compassion hovers around his voice on "Stinkfist" as he reaches in his hand knuckle deep: "This may hurt a little but it's something you'll get used to."

This, of course, is from a man who explained Undertow's "Four Degrees" ("Lay back and let me show you another way/Take it up higher/You'll like this in/Don't pull it out") thus: "Apparently the anal cavity has eight more muscles and is four degrees warmer than the vagina," he's quoted as saying (again from the Website). "This, however, is not a song about violation -- it is a song about opening up, completely, without reservation." Keenan shows how frighteningly close a resemblance love has to violation. What's scary is that in his songs you sometimes can't tell the difference.