Album Review: Tool's Lateralus

As both a progressive rock advocate and a student pursuing sound engineering, one of my most influential bands is Tool. I find that their masterpiece, Lateralus, to be a milestone in both the progressive and metal genres. Even though it only contains 13 songs, it’s seventy-eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds long. With eight of the thirteen songs being over six minutes long and two of the songs only being one minute transition pieces, this album seemed to push the barrier of most metal albums to this date. It’s actually kind of a shame that they always seem to be roped in with the metal and hard rock genre because their music doesn’t usually tend to always fit within those restraints. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 and since it’s release in 2001 it has sold over two and a half million copies. It has also been named 123 on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Definitive 200 list.
The members of Tool have become masters of their craft. Many of their songs are filled with symbolism both musically and lyrically. An example lyrically would be their first song of the album entitled, The Grudge. The lyrics and story of the song are making reference to the story The Scarlett Letter. Musically, they only seem to bend the rules of math and meter to create seamless works of art. The albums title track, Lateralus, is a good example of this. The song is about living in a non-linear fashion. It’s about not really living by the norm, which goes along with Tool’s common theme of thinking for one self. They also connect this to the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence is a pattern of numbers that is the sum of the past two numbers. For instance, the first two numbers are 0 and 1. Those two added together equals 1; one is then added to 1 and that equals two. This pattern continues so that the sequence looks like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc. This system of numbers, which has been dated back as late as the sixth century, is used in lyrics of Lateralus. Maynard James Keenan, Tool’s vocalist, follows the lyrics emphasizing syllables in the Fibonacci sequence. An example of this would be the first verse going as followed:

(1) Black,
(1) then,
(2) white are,
(3) all I see,
(5) in my infancy,
(8) red and yellow then came to be,
(5) reaching out to me,
(3) lets me see.

This continues in the next verse and Maynard even ‘spirals’ further up and down the sequence. Going further on from this there are the time signatures. The intro main riff are descending time signatures 9/8, 8/8, 7/8. This corresponds with sixteenth number of the sequence, 987. It’s the little things like this that make this album revolutionary, and one of my favorites albums.

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