Twelve small Steps for Maynard, one giant leap for music as art
Written: Sep 11 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: A radical change to ambient, sonic beauty, without compromising the band's core virtues
Cons: An offensive term not applied to discs like this one.
The Bottom Line: A stunningly beautiful album worth a look from any believer in music's power. The best album of 2003.
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| punkrawka's Full Review: Thirteenth Step by A Perfect Circle |
There are precious few things in life that can be truly relied upon. Humans, for all their virtues, have an inexplicable tendency to change, backstab and prove wholly unreliable. Cars break down. Stuff falls apart. Computers crash and delete entire reviews after you meticulously slave at them (I'm not bitter). Some days, all you can count on is that a good beer will be a good beer, and a quality cigar a satisfying smoke.
Oh, those things and Maynard James Keenan. The enigmatic Tool frontman has immersed himself in countless musical endeavors, wildly disparate in style but unified by their uncanny tendency to be powerful and touching. Keenan's careful attention to musical and lyrical quality have set him apart in a musical universe of sloppy acts, consistently providing experiences that bear listening to time and time again. An exemplification of this is A Perfect Circle's sophomore effort Thirteenth Step.
A Perfect Circle coalesced around the creative impetus of former Nine Inch Nails guitar tech Billy Howerdel, who had composed most of the material to the band's debut Mer De Noms long before it entered the production phase. After Keenan tracked vocal auditions for the effort, Howerdel wisely enlisted him, and the result set the all-time record for first-week sales of a debut album. Since that fateful disc, bassist Paz Lechtin has moved on to less-fruitful endeavors, but the band has now benefited wildly from the addition of Nine Inch Nails bassist Danny Lohner (Lohner and Keenan had already collaborated on the Underworld Soundtrack), resulting in an album that's at once drastically changed in favor of ambient, sonic depth, yet is nonetheless familiar in its darkness, instrumental core and unparalleled lyrical skill.
The album's new direction is immediately made clear when "The Package" opens things up, displaying the full range of A Perfect Circle's abilities at once -- moving from a slow-picked guitar with tribal bass and percussion work, and slowly escalating as Keenan imperceptibly elevates his vocals. The track, which clocks in as the band's longest to date (nearly eight minutes) finally crescendoes with a crushing riff while Keenan cries "Take what's mine!" Then the track pacifies and goes out much as it came in -- quietly, driven by a bass riff that segues perfectly into "Weak And Powerless," the effort's lead single. The track's beautifully understated instrumentals belie its nature as a straightforward alternative-rock tune -- a return to more familiar territory for the band. But while the instrumentals are captivating, it's Maynard's lyricism that steals the show, especially as the track closes and he plaintively propels the bridge:
"Little angel, go away / Come again some other day
The devil has my ear today / I'll never hear a word you say
I promised I would find a little solace and some peace of mind
Whatever, just as long as I don't feel so
Desperate / Rather than so weak and powerless / Over you. . ."
The album moves from here to an unquestionable standout moment, "The Noose." The track is gorgeously flooded with a swath of sonic beauty, with a slowly escalating instrumental section, but once again is overwhelmed by Keenan's touching lyrics: "Not to pull your halo down / Around your neck and tug you off your cloud / But I'm more than just a little curious / How you plan to go about making your amends / To the dead. . ." The track escalates beautifully, by its ending incorporating layered Keenan vocals, one selection intoning the chorus and the other, more prominent one repeating "Your halo slipping down." Then, the instrumentals cut out to isolate Keenan at a near-whisper: "Your halo slipping down / To hang you now. . ." If that's not spine-chilling, I don't know quite what is.
"Blue" firmly establishes the departure of this album into sonic territory. The track showcases an intriguing ability -- without changing the actual volume of the instrumentals, the verses and choruses are given a prominent loud/soft feel with airy, distorted guitars and more extended melodies. This intriguing spin on alternative marks A Perfect Circle's newfound affinity for ambient sonic progression even as it continues to display the band's talents. Delving further still into the abstract is "Vanishing," a track with more concrete instrumental development, but one that nonetheless extends the disc's foray into uncharted waters, as Keenan hushedly intones a limited vocal set ("Disappear / Thinner, thinner / Into the air"), for a result not unlike Radiohead's "How To Disappear Completely." "A Stranger" continues to delve into this subdued landscape, with slow-picked acoustic leads and an understated string section. The instrumentals ramp themselves up a bit, though, with the strings coming out in full force during the bridge as Keenan cries out the track's most powerful lines: "Shy away, shy away, phantom / Run away, terrified child."
But lest we gain the misperception that A Perfect Circle has forgotten the virtues of rock 'n' roll, "The Outsider" brings the album back to a potent, aggressive core, with Keenan seething anger against a "drama queen," highlighting all the while the utility of violent imagery in genuinely artistic music: "Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time / What's your rush, now? / Everyone will have his day to die." The track bristles with the kind of aggression befitting a competent band somewhat restrained to the margins of a prog-oriented record, and Howerdel's guitar work is at the top of its game.
The album drifts back out into uncharted territory, though, with its next tracks. "Crime" is a slightly befuddling track, upheld mostly by a pounding drum track, with airy guitars layered far in the back, and even more restrained vocals that essentially amount to Keenan whispering a numeric sequence with no immediate significance. Given his affinity for such mathematical antics in the past, though, there's little doubt that the numbers bear some serious relevance to the rest of the disc. The veil of abstraction is hardly lifted, though, with "The Nurse Who Loved Me," an intriguingly different track that's cast in a children's-movie-soundtrack mold, even including decidedly un-Maynard-like lyricism: "She acts just like a nurse with all the other guys." If the album has a weak moment, it lies in these two tracks, which are either incredibly difficult to unravel or simply a meandering a bit too far off-course. Nonetheless, they do fall in place with the disc's brooding, ambient nature.
Pushing the album back into a hard-rock mold, and even injecting a bit of social commentary on the issue of war, is "Pet," in which Keenan intones powerfully, "Count the bodies like sheep to the rhythm of the war drums!" The track's musical dynamics are deliciously constructed, with a heavy riff that occasionally pauses to give Keenan hushed moments, before catapulting into the heavier verses referenced above. As the track crashes to a close, Keenan redoubles his commentary, crying the line "Sway the rhythm of the new world order!" One of the album's most brilliant transition occurs as Keenan closes the track by crying "Go back to sleep," a line whose whispered repetitions open up "Lullaby," a track that's overridden with lush ambience, propelled by a haunting set of hummer female vocals atop drums that are disturbingly warlike. It's interconnected tracks like these that make listening to any Keenan project so satisfying and relentlessly disturbing all at once.
The album closes out with "Gravity," a track that balances the record out and sums it up both musically and lyrically. At once meandering and cautiously directed, the song incorporates slow-rumbling bass lines beneath Keenan's quietly intoned verses. As the chorus launches in a more escalated mode, Keenan cries out "I choose to live," a fitting summation of an album as ensconced in his humanist philosophies as this one.
It's incredibly rare for a band to do with a sophomore album what A Perfect Circle has done with Thirteenth Step -- to make a radical departure, sound comfortingly familiar, and to play genuinely great music in the process. The addition of Lohner to the group's lineup has unquestionably enabled their ability to get in touch with brooding, beautiful sonic depth, and Keenan has continued his unmistakable trend of contributing top-notch vocals and lyricism to any effort he touches. Thirteenth Step is not a quickly digestible change, nor was it intended to be. Instead, it's a richly beautiful rock record, one that immediately goes down as the musical accomplishment of 2003, with no regard to the three and a half months remaining in the year. Any believer in the universal power of music will find something to love in this album -- A Perfect Circle is actively challenging the mantra that "you can't please all of the people all of the time." And time itself will tell, but disproving that tired slogan just might be their next feat.
Recommended:
Yes
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