The world, in all honesty, is full of good rock bands. It doesn't take much of a search to find decent music that will get your feet tapping or get a few of its vocal hooks stuck in your head for weeks on end. What's in true scarcity is the rock artist -- a group combining clear vision with lyrical and musical depth and intelligence. We've moved from Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd to Blink-182 and "garage rock" (not to even speak of boy bands and teenage-girl pop). But while true musical artists may have been pushed out of the limelight in our modern world, they still exist. Tool is the ultimate representative of this fact. From their underground EP Opiate to the breakthrough album Undertow (which included the big hit track "Sober"), the band slowly built up a following the old-fashioned way -- by writing appealing, intricate music with beautiful singing and lyrics to match. But the band's junior work, Ænima, was the impetus that drove them toward the supremely artistic works that would come to define their career on Lateralus, and (knock on wood) for many albums to come. But where Lateralus finds humanity's hope amidst its gloomy corridors, Ænima maintains a darker veneer all around. The two albums, taken as whole experiences, complement one another just as fully as their individual tracks work to form an intricate weave. But Ænima itself is where the band's career took a drastic turn for the better, and is a fully amazing experience all by itself.
The album opens with "Stinkfist," a perfect opening piece complete with a slow build and tiny electronic noises. Vocalist Maynard James Keenan sings here of desensitization and maintaining the vitality of life: "How can this mean anything to me if I really don't feel anything at all? / I'll keep digging 'till I feel something." The lyrics are carefully crafted to match the music's slow brew, putting the song's meaning into both aspects for a refined, complete feeling. The album's cutting, angry and controversial second track further highlights the changes undergone by Tool in Ænima's release. "Eulogy" rails against a religious or cultish figure of some kind -- many claim that it's obviously Jesus, some claim L. Ron Hubbard, some claim that the song is intentionally vague, to be applied to all who would call for blind faith -- and rips on him relentlessly. "You claimed all this time that you would die for me / Why, then, are you so surprised when you see your own eulogy? ... / Come down, get off your f*cking cross / We need the f*cking space to nail the next fool martyr."
The album unfolds into a wealth of worthwhile material. "Forty-Six & 2" is one of the song's two most uplifting moments, singing of human evolution (a human cell has forty-six chromosomes; forty-eight would be the next step for humanity). The song's sense of striving is fulfilled as Keenan closes the track by singing, "Forty-six and two are just ahead of me," right before the track unfurls into a punishing closing riff. The other blissful moment here is the epic 14-minute closer, "Third Eye," which is an unmissable piece of Tool's musicianship. Opening with a quiet, heartbeat-like bass drum atop sampled voices discussing the benefits of spiritual drug use, the dreamlike song slowly unravels through a spiritual revelation, peaking with Maynard repeating the line "Prying open my third eye!" atop a repeated instrumental section at a different time pace, an intriguing, satisfying contrast.
Even when the album is less optimistic, though, it consistently hits whatever mood it is seeking. "Push it" (which should be spelled all as one word -- thank you, Epinions language filters) is a brutal exploration of revenge for an abusive relationship. The 10-minute song's crescendo is at once disturbing ("Remember I will always love you, even as I claw your f*cking throat away") and touching, with a sweeping feel as it closes up. "H." is another track that moves slowly from near-whispered tones into a rapid frenzy by its end, accentuated especially by Danny Carey's potent drum work. "Hooker With a Penis" is easily the most straighforwardly aggro track on the CD, railing against pretentious fans who accuse the band of "selling out" -- "I sold my soul to make a record, dipsh*t / And you bought one." Finally, "Ænema" (different spelling intentional) rails against the empty materialism of West Coast life (or life in general), praising a theoretical flood that wipes out California, as Maynard cries "Learn to swim!" repeatedly.
Ænima is one of the definitive rock albums of the 1990s, even if it's less known as such than Nirvana's Nevermind or Pearl Jam's Ten. The CD's gloomy, brooding hard rock tone comes together over 15 tracks into a cohesive, logically ordered whole that's musically an lyrically layered enough to be as entertaining on he 100th listen as on the first. The album moves organically throughout itself, providing a great lesson not just in Tool's potential, but in the viability of truly artistic rock music in the postmodern world. That the band would develop these strengths in a slightly warmer direction on Lateralus only speaks to the lasting value of such an effort. And indeed, Ænima is an album that should not be missed.
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