Three-time Grammy Award winning alternative metal pioneers, Tool, return to Washington fifteen years into their career with their latest effort, 10,000 Days firmly under their belt. Boasting such previous work as Undertow and Aenima (their tribute to Bill Hicks), the band surpasses legend status and continues to up an ante they themselves helped establish.
Tool's greatest breakthrough was to introduce dark, vaguely underground metal to the preening pretentiousness of art rock. Or maybe it was introducing the self-absorbed pretension of art rock to the wearing grind of post-thrash metal — the order really doesn't matter. Though Metallica wrote their multi-sectioned, layered songs as if they were composers, they kept their musical attack ferociously at street level. Tool didn't. They embraced the artsy, faux-bohemian preoccupations of Jane's Addiction while they simultaneously paid musical homage to the dark, relentlessly bleak visions of grindcore, death metal, and thrash. Even with their post-punk influences, they executed their music with the ponderous, anti-song aesthetic of prog rock, alternating between long, detailed instrumental interludes and tuneless, pseudo-meaningful lyrical rants in their songs.
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would the boy you were be proud of the man you are
Growing old ain't for wimps
Lonnie Gane