this is my blog | hi, i like music and doing my own thing im working on building my physical music collection and learning to play the guitar | i want to be in a band. eventually | youll see anything here
This was the album that put the band on the mainstream map, but everyone in the scene was already waiting for it to drop. I still remember listening to this for probably the 100th time and thinking to myself: This might be the peak of pop punk. It may not get better than this… and that’s still an argument today.
Fall Out Boy released two of the greatest pop punk albums of all time. This is one of them. I still remember the moment this album came out. I picked up the CD the first week it was released and I was fucking blown away. This was a game changer.
"Enjoy the Silence" was originally written by Martin Gore as a slow, minimal ballad featuring only a harmonium and his vocals. It was transformed into the upbeat, synth-pop masterpiece known today after bandmate Alan Wilder insisted on adding a dance beat and Flood encouraged adding a guitar riff, a change that made them realize they had a hit.
Wow, I don't even know where to start here! There's a lot to unpack, so let's hop right in.
So, if you haven't heard Tool before, they've got a lot going on. They're an American progressive metal band, and Lateralus was their third album. It was a turning point for the group, and they saw a pivot from a more straightforward metal sound to their more recognizable sound: esoteric, complex, and introspective.
Fun story about the release of this album; Tool was an outspoken opponent of file-sharing sites like Napster and Limewire, which were rampant in the early 2000s. A month before Lateralus dropped, the group announced their new album, titled Systema Encéphale, along with a number of track names like "Riverchrist" and "Encephatalis". Predictably, the file-sharing sites became flooded with these songs, except the problem was... Systema Encéphale. Then, Tool did a surprise release of the actual album, pulling a complete bait-and-switch on the pirates.
I first learned about this group by playing Guitar Hero: World Tour back in 2009. There was a Tool concert featured in the game, which at the time was a little... intense. The marathon-length songs, mind-bending meter and syncopation changes, and trippy visuals certainly were a lot for 9th grade me.
It turns out my wife is really into Tool though, so I gave them another chance a number of years later. I liked them a lot better the second time around!
The inspiration for this album album comes from a variety of sources. With the name and album art design, there's clearly influence from human anatomy, mysticism, and sacred geometry. The actual songs take inspiration from such things as: the Fibonacci sequence, Buddhist monk chanting, a paranoid phone call about aliens controlling the government, and slowed down audio of frontman Maynard James Keenan's cat.
Also: picture discs! I have a few in my collection, and man, these ones are cool. Some Trve Avdiophies™ turn their nose up at them, claiming they are more prone to warping and have more surface noise. Call me uncultured, but they sound fine to me. Fun little Easter egg, on side D you can see artist Alex Gray hid the word "GOD" in the brain matter.
The music itself is so, so cool. Each member of the group is firing on all cylinders in this album. Maynard, of course, kind of steals the show with his vocals. He imparts this almost primal energy to his songs. I also have to shout out Justin Chancellor on bass. Those riffs are so iconic. One contemporary reviewer negatively compared Tool's sound to "Black Sabbath jamming with Genesis at the bottom of a coal shaft", and like? Yeah, but in a good way? The way the sound effortlessly flows from contemplative solo guitar to fierce, intense full ensemble playing is so good. Good luck trying to dance to it, though. They're definitely a group like Dream Theater or Rush that relish in disorienting time signatures and syncopation.
My favorite song on the album is "Schism", which has one of the most iconic bass lines in all rock music. Working at a music store, it's probably between this and "Seven Nation Army" for what gets played the most by people testing basses. I'm not even going to attempt to post a vinyl rip, because 1. a song this popular will 100% get auto-flagged by Tumblr, and 2. you really owe it to yourself to watch the music video.
Tool's visuals are nothing if not consistently very, very weird. Content warning for weird body horror, if you're sensitive to that sort of thing.
The song is generally about how relationships fall apart, and the human need for connection. Maynard James Keenan says of it, "They're all about relationships. Learning how to integrate communication back into a relationship. How are we as lovers, as artists, as brothers - how are we going to reconstruct this beautiful temple that we've built and that's tumbled down? It's universal relationship stuff."
Apparently, the initial draft of the song was much more personal, and was changed last minute because guitarist Adam Jones thought it hit too close to home. It very explicitly mentioned the growing creative tension in the band, especially between Keenan and Jones, and after a lengthy discussion Keenan relented and made the lyrics more vague and universal.
The poetry that comes from
The squaring off between
And the circling is worth it
Finding beauty in the dissonance
"Skulls" was famously recorded by Glenn Danzig, Jerry Only, and drummer Arthur Googy in a single take. Jerry Only simply nodded his head to cue Arthur when to start hitting the drums, and all the hand-clapping heard in the track was overdubbed later.
i hate it when i make something healthy for dinner and then don't want it. i am not the person i was when i made this. why would i think that baby carrots, kale, and mushrooms in truffle sauce was a yummy meal. stardew valley ass meal
Linkin Park originally named themselves "Lincoln Park" after the park in Santa Monica, California. However, they changed the spelling to "Linkin" for a purely practical reason: the domain name lincolnpark.com was already taken and too expensive for the band to afford at the time.
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