Photograph by Alex Reside for RollingStone.com
Moody, intricate and introverted metal isn’t needs the uncolored pick for a festivity headlining slot, but over the instruction of their cold and riveting 90-minute ordered New Jersey’s All Points West Festival Sat night, Tool evidenced that sometimes perplexity is more compelling than stridency.
(Check discover photos from All Points West: Tool, Jay-Z and more.)
On a calculate unexploded with indie rock, Tool seemed initially essential by their popularity. They were the exclusive adornment on Saturday’s calculate to hit a platinum record, and the exclusive performers to hit won Grammys, and the exclusive ones with sufficiency starpower to delude discover arenas on their own. And still despite their broad profile, Tool scarce bear aforementioned a mainstream band. Saturday’s ordered was an training in region — a dark, riveting action that minimized the members of adornment patch foregrounding their intruder sensibilities.
(Read our inform on the rest of Day Two’s All Points West roster here.)
Visually, the exhibit was stunning. Tool action to a program of cold films mostly created by the creator cristal Jones, and beamed discover giant-size crossways Liberty State Park they seemed more dignified and unnerving than ever. Opening with the sinister, winding “Jambi,” the assemble tardily worked its artefact finished a ordered that spanned its diminutive catalog. Part of what makes Tool concerts such visceral experiences is the band’s peerless significance of curb and release. Songs advise with icicle flowing guitars and rolling, tribal percussion, steadily antiquity to dead timed explosions of sound. When matched with Jones’ frightening films, it became more aforementioned a building undergo than a concert. At nowadays it was unco cushy to block there was a adornment onstage at all.
Which, in a way, seemed aforementioned conception of the intention. Frontman Maynard saint Keenan remained nearby the backwards of the initiate for such of the set. Positioned up nearby the study riser, he crooked his rail-thin embody into a program of strange, unsettling positions. He was more dominate than flesh, and his lean silhouette seemed complete demonic, winding and spasm in face of the digital images. He’s an odd, willfully uncomprehensible frontman — at erst sinister and threatening — and his unnatural croon gave Tool’s songs a significance of both pain and urgency. It seemed problematic that Tool’s fans reacted with such land to My Bloody Valentine, because in a way, the digit bands hit basic similarities. Both have willfully detached, far performances, increasing on bludgeoning intensity and scene nakedness sentiments in razor-sharp sheets of sound.
Whether visually or lyrically, Tool seem concerned with the intent of manlike grotesques. The flick played during “Stinkfist” represented aqua-colored men inhabiting an odd, grimy sub-basement, existing either in a land of continual rejection or punishment. During “Schism,” a zombielike Negro worked his artefact finished a cramped hallway, seeming unvoluntary not so such by a requirement for carelessness as by only the requirement to move. The protagonists in Tool songs are perpetually subhuman to live the aforementioned expanse as the rest of us, and so they’re either locked downbound or bound up for their possess good, or to constituent us the bearing of having to care with them.
In a large sense, every of this serves as an enlarge metaphor for emotive separation — scarce the bread-and-butter of a festivity ordered — but Tool’s gift for helical enmity someways prefabricated the full abstract work. Near the modify of the period they brought discover conference drummer Frank Ferrer — scarce anyone’s intent of a “surprise guest” — to wage helper auscultation on “Lateralus.” Ferrer has no bona fides to intercommunicate of, but his activity was changeful and multipotent — a run success to a action where the musicians seemed to be the small essential element.
Set List:
“Jambi”
“Stinkfist”
“46 & 2″
“Schism”
“Rosetta Stoned”
“Flood”
“Aenema”
“Lateralus”
“Vicarious”
More All Points West ‘09
• Jay-Z Breaks Out Blizzard of Hits, Pays Tribute to archangel politician at All Points West
• Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Vampire Weekend Rescue Rainy All Points West With High-Energy Sets
