07.09.06
The Sharpest Tool in the Shed
It’s not that I don’t have any more computer issues to whine about, but I generally strive to not sound like a broken record, so I think I’ll just stop complaining until I finally get my wallet out and empty it all over a bunch of hardware stores.
Friday, I believe I discovered Tool. It’s not that I didn’t know of them already, I’d heard one (1) song with them before, namely Eulogy, and while I thought it was nice and interesting and original, it didn’t really speak to me. But then they release this new album, 10,000 Days, from which the songs Vicarious and The Pot were played on the Danmarks Radio’s Modern Rock station. After hearing it a few times, I began to like The Pot, which has a pretty weird and fascinating beginning, and Vicarious stuck straight onto my brain first time I heard it.
Being slightly annoyed with myself for missing them at Roskilde (their concert and Volbeat’s performance are the only reasons I might have gone to the festival), I decided to make up for it by buying 10,000 Days. I must say, that is one impressive album. Their music is pretty weird, but their songs appeal to me with their experimenting instrumentals, their defiantly nonstandard structures, their mildly creepy and psychedelic atmosphere, and their deep, murky lyrics. Especially the lyrics I find very fascinating, some of them seem pretty straight forward, whereas others are much more resistant to interpretation, and they often contain more or less obscure references to religion or psychology.
Rosetta Stoned is probably the most difficult song to interpret, I can’t figure out if it’s about being a misunderstood and ignored prophet or just about being completely stoned. Either way, it creates a lot of strange and disturbing images in my head, and that’s always interesting.
I would have to say my favourite song right now is Right in Two. The meaning of the lyrics isn’t very difficult to understand, but the instrumentation is incredibly atmospheric and melodic and the vocals have this airy, eerie quality to them along with, of course, a really good melody. On top of all that, it’s a very dynamic piece of music that seems to evolve rather than change as it goes on.
And then of course there is the packaging. In, I can only assume, an effort to make people buy their record rather than downloading it from each other, they decided to include a couple of stereoscopic lenses in the cover itself. It works amazingly, I think I’ve already spent an hour just looking at the detailed, mysterious, pseudo-intellectual, symbol-laden images in captivating 3D. Of course the drawback is that the list of songs is hidden away somewhere inside that little cover-book thingy rather than on the back of the cover where it should be, but these lenses are such a cool gimmick, I will forgive the extreme inconvenience.
To summarize, I think this album is great for two purposes: You can either lie down on your bed, put this CD on, and get completely lost in its weird, experimental, psychedelic world, immersing yourself in the music and the images it creates in your head; or you can leave it on while you work or just do something else, and it will serve excellently as background music which occasionally jumps out and grabs your attention for a moment, inspiring you for whatever you’re doing.
And to finish off, a mostly useless rating for my own amusement:
Tool - 10,000 Days
Music: 
Packaging:
