Review: Tool, “Fear Inoculum”

As sure as day follows night and lazy reviewers use phrases like “as day follows night,” some albums are simply bulletproof. Well, bulletproof for a limited time.

Some of that armor comes from the circumstances from which an album arrives, like Tool’s newest album titled Fear Inoculum, their first in thirteen years. That’s thirteen years of pent-up anxiety on the part of the band’s longtime fans. They never said they broke up, but they were certainly acting like they were broken up. Why weren’t they making new music? It wasn’t bassist Justin Chancellor or guitarist Adam Jones, and certainly not drum guru and prominent band mouthpiece Danny Carey, who regularly stated that there would be new music. It was all a matter of getting everyone in the room. The music press regularly cited frontman Maynard James Keenan as the holdout, more interested in focusing on his Puscifer project, and later the A Perfect Circle reunion.

And now they make and release new music, and you’re so happy that this new thing exists at all, you’ll forgive almost anything. Fortunately, the individual members of Tool are absolute monsters with their instruments. You can’t say that Fear Inoculum is slap-dash or half-hearted. Tracks like “Invincible” and “Culling Voices” attest to that. But can you say it is worth thirteen years of laying low? Does it offer growth or is it a picking-up where 10,000 Days left off? Does it even matter?

For myself, I just don’t know. The album is everything you’ve come to expect from Tool – the tribal rhythms, the bass rumble, the stabs of crunchy guitar, and vocals that alternate between mystic moans and fevered barking – and if all you were hoping for was something that stayed true to the band’s ethos, it’s perfect. If, on the other hand, you find it too easy to pick out moments on the album that reference the back catalog (and not in a particularly crafty manner), you’ll be enthralled by the virtuosity of the performances but not satisfied.

This could mark me as a sort of heretic, because hardcore Tool fans approach the band with religious fervor. To criticize Fear Inoculum is to imply that I just did not get it, or didn’t try hard enough to get it. It suggests that I was not impressed by the numerology that informs the patterns within the rhythms. Look, you don’t hear Fibonacci equations. You hear songs. You can appreciate there is more in the margins, but it’s nonetheless marginal. The artwork for the extravagant physical edition, coordinated by Jones and frequent associate Mackie Osborne, is sufficiently trippy…but also cannot be heard in the songs. Can those songs stand on their own and stand apart from past work? Or do they hew too close to that past work?

In other words, they’re damned if they do sound like Tool and damned if they don’t. The larger question is whether or not you will take this down from the shelf as often as you do AEnima or Lateralus. I suspect that even the faithful would admit they will not. They’ll live with the record, praise it, hold it up on a pedestal, but will revert back to those records they loved first, and that’s okay.

Take as a measure Sol Invictus (2015) from Faith No More. This was another very long-awaited record – so long-awaited that fans really did give up on the premise – and when it arrived, it was a hard rock album as expected. Many hailed it as a return to form and many more were just glad to see them there. If you are in the mood for Faith No More, are you streaming Sol Invictus or dialing up The Real Thing or Angel Dust?

That’s what I thought.

I say this not to diminish Tool’s Fear Inoculum, but to ground it in a realistic setting. The album is well done, but can’t hope to unseat your favorites. Give it a try and enjoy it for what it is, but recognize that your excitement about the event is cladding it in protection that a week or a month down the line won’t be there. The songs will have to stand on their own, and that might not be enough for anyone but the most committed.