How do you review an album 13 years in the making? How would you deconstruct a band’s nuances that have been built up during this time? And how would you even do that when that band is TOOL?
I don’t know these things. I probably don’t have a vocabulary wide enough to even explain the many different layers and multifaceted parts of each track. What I do know is that TOOL has knocked Taylor Shift’s album to third place and even stopped it from reaching number 1 on the billboard charts altogether.
What an epic return to form!
Fear Inoculum is not so much an album as an experience. Every chord, every melody, every sound effect has been thought out and put together to provide an incredible journey. And how would you even review a journey? Especially a journey of the mind? For each person its going to be different. For each person, its going to be something on another level.
With this in mind, I am not going to review each song, or a play-by-play as I have done for other albums. If you’re looking for something like that, maybe look up another site. This review is not so much a review as it is a telling. A telling to go and listen to the album. Get some good headphones, get some tea. Find a comfy chair and for the next 86 minutes, experience TOOL. Experience Fear Inoculum.
Or you could write this off as dad rock, and miss out on what is going to be (in my opinion) one of this decades defining albums. And not only for the genre either, but in the way artists approach the creative process of making an album. The timeline has shifted – Before Fear Inoculum and After Fear Inoculum. You may not notice it right away, but this is album is day dot.
Now what are you doing reading this when you have an album to listen to?!
