Tool - Fear Inoculum
I know I've been going on a bit about it lately, but I've finally finished listening to the new Tool album. I was going to go on a bit of a tweet storm about it, but I thought I should instead just post about it on my blog.
This isn't going to be a long post, nor will it be fully coherent, I feel I just want to get this down in words, I might edit it in future if I ever come back to this.
Anyway, holy shit this is a hell of an album. I think my favourite song on the album is the second track, Pneuma, in particular the movement about half way through the song. Oh yeah, with a few exceptions each song is over 10 minutes long, but each one of these has different parts, kind of like how classical music has different movements and whatnot.
It's without a doubt a Tool album. That bit isn't up for debate at all. I will say a lot of the tracks are a bit more mellow than what I was expecting, I know the title track is a pretty distant one, but I was sort of expecting that to be a bit like how the first track on Meddle by Pink Floyd is kind of spacey and distant, not that I'm disappointed or anything (not in the slightest). I'm now going back through some of my other favourite Tool songs and I can really hear how they've refined their sound. I think Lateralus will still be my favourite album, but I think I will need a couple of repeat listens, maybe with the lyrics up the next time through, I never really appreciated 10,000 days until I had done that.
I'm glad I got the digital edition with the small little interludes between tracks, I read that the drummer had wanted to make the entire album a single long song (which is a thing I'm a massive sucker for) and these bridging songs definitely improved it for me, but it's already a bit of an ask in these days to put aside an hour and a half to just get the full experience, so 10-15 minute long tracks is probably the better way of doing it.