The full payoff of Penuma doesn’t come until more than nine minutes in, but when it does, the weighty guitar work gives headbangers a chance to snap their necks. It has more to do with listeners, who have grown older - and less patient - after a 13-year wait. Fear Inoculum is hardly perfect, but that isn’t because of the band’s self-satisfaction. That assessment - that Tool is now indebted to itself and itself only - will be a familiar refrain going forward. Inevitably, some will say the record wasn’t worth the wait, that it sounds like a bookend to 10,000 Days, while abandoning the straight-ahead styles of Undertow (from 1993) and Ænima (1996). Verbosity is nothing new for Tool, but the 86-minute album can be a marathon for those who have not kept pace with the band’s increasing fondness for explorative musical journeys.
Six songs crack the 10-minute mark, with 7empest reaching the near-exhaustive length of 15:43. The band didn’t skimp on the running time, either.
“Drifting through this boundlessness, this madness of our own making.” “Pray we mitigate the ruin, calling all to arms and order,” Keenan sings on Descending, with Jones’s chainsaw-like guitar buzzing beneath. Keenan’s lyrics on Fear Inoculum are invigorating and inspirational, with political epithets coming at almost every turn. The end result of all the hard-rock hysteria is symphonic, spectacular and special. 30 release, Tool’s entire discography hit the charts hard, breaking several records in the process.Īt one point, Tool songs made up the entire Top 10 on the digital rock charts, the first time in history one act has occupied the top tier. Aided by pent-up excitement over the Aug. Tool set up the Fear Inoculum release with finesse, unveiling its catalogue to digital retailers and streaming services for the first time on Aug. Or, maybe the quartet of drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones, singer Maynard James Keenan and bassist Justin Chancellor simply took its own sweet time, emboldened by the fact that its millions of fans would support the record no matter when it arrived. So what finally brought the saga of Fear Inoculum to a close? The prog-metal kings have returned with an album of such dizzying intensity and sonic sophistication, you could argue it took 13 years to make something this epic. Tool fans would have had no shortage of other metal acts to explore during the 13-year wait between albums.īut that was never going to be the case for diehards of the Los Angeles prog-metal band, who have obsessed over every Google alert since 2006 in their desire for a follow-up to Tool’s last studio recording, 10,000 Days.ĭetails about a possible new album came in fits and starts, with one postponement following another. Waiting nearly a decade and a half - 4,750 days, to be exact - for a band’s new record would send even the most devout supporter scurrying for alternatives.