Retooling: Tool back with fifth album

It’s been a long time since its last release but Tool is back to sate a huge global fanbase. Why so long?

Tool play the blue stage at the The Big Day Out in 2011.

When the singer and songwriter of one of the world’s most ­popular bands sat before a microphone at one of the world’s most popular podcasts last week, he was ready to share some long-awaited news.

Actually, “long-awaited” doesn’t quite cover it, and nor does “highly anticipated” or “long overdue” or any other music industry cliche implying expectation.

For the millions of fans of Tool — an American progressive metal quartet known for its tricky, lengthy song structures that roil beneath Maynard James Keenan’s inimitable vocals — the likelihood of hearing new music has for many years been rated slim to none.

Its Grammy-winning fourth album, 10,000 Days, was ­released in 2006. Since then? Silence.

The title of Tool’s last album became a running joke among its fans, who lamented that it might take that long — about 27 years — for the group to write, record and release new songs.

“We’re a very difficult band,” Keenan told American comedian Joe Rogan at a podcast studio in Los Angeles. “The four of us are a lot of f..king work. Everything is a f..king committee meeting — and it always gets shut down.”

Despite the lack of new recordings, the group has continued to tour intermittently. Since the release of 10,000 Days, Tool has visited Australia three times, including headline appearances at the Big Day Out in 2007 and 2011, while a six-date arena tour in 2013 sold about 75,000 tickets.

On each of these tours, the four musicians performed a setlist of no more than a dozen long songs, many of them dating back to the turn of the century. Tool concerts were slickly produced, and ­unusual, as band members were barely visible to the audience, while Keenan preferred to be up the back, next to the drum kit.

Besides the thundering soundtrack, the focal point of these shows was large screens projecting absorbing animated visuals and a superlative light show. Inevitably, those dozen or so songs were played flawlessly — yet over time it became apparent Tool had become a band capable only of looking back, never forward.

For more than a decade, buying a ticket to see Tool in concert has been akin to queuing for a museum exhibition. You knew you’d be witnessing something great, old and highly valuable — but you also knew you’d no sooner be hearing a note of new music than you’d be sharing the mosh pit with a unicorn.

That all changed last week. While The Joe Rogan Experience was being broadcast live online, Keenan tapped out a message on his phone before publishing it on the social media accounts of the band he co-founded in Los Angeles almost three decades ago.

“Fear Inoculum, Aug 30th, 2019,” he wrote. “Album art, lead track, and pre-order info TBA. Thank you for your patience.”

In effect, that short message was the beginning of an answer to a question that has puzzled Tool’s many fans for many years: what the hell has taken so long?

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In popular music history, there’s only one other notable example of a rock band at its creative and commercial peak pressing pause on its studio career for an interminable length of time.

When Guns N’ Roses released Chinese Democracy, it arrived 15 years after its last collection, The Spaghetti Incident? — an album composed entirely of cover songs. The key factor in those ongoing delays seems to have been a revolving door policy on both musicians and producers, thanks to the abrasive personality of singer-songwriter Axl Rose.

By 2005, according to The New York Times, production costs had reached $US13 million because of seemingly endless recording and re-recording. On its eventual release in 2008, the album was met with the equivalent of a smattering of polite applause ­before the world swiftly moved on.

“For years it was widely assumed Chinese Democracy would never come out; in retrospect, the delay is all anybody cares about,” wrote Steven Hyland on the website Grantland in 2013. “As music, Chinese Democracy is merely the second-worst GNR record; as a figure of speech, it is shorthand for the grandest of boondoggles.”

Tool, however, have never had a hit like Paradise City or Welcome to the Jungle. Its jagged rhythms, distinctive squalls of electric guitar distortion, innovative bass tones and hard-hitting percussion have never been considered appropriate soundtracks for cafes or supermarkets.

While Keenan has displayed a strong melodic sensibility dating back to the band’s 1992 debut EP, Opiate, his vocals are more often screamed than sweetly sung, and his subject matter can often be loosely grouped under a banner marked “adult themes”.

A review of chorus lyrics from Tool’s most popular songs ­includes the following: “Why can’t we not be sober? / I just want to start this over” (Sober, 1993); “My shadow / Shedding skin / I’ve been picking / My scabs again” (Forty Six & 2, 1996); “Over-thinking, over-analysing separates the body from the mind / Withering my intuition, leaving opportunities behind” (Lateralus, 2001); “ ’Cause I need to watch things die / From a distance / Vicariously, I live while the whole world dies” (Vicarious, 2006).

None of which are anywhere near as pleasing to the ear as “Whoa-oh-oh! Sweet child of mine / Whoa, oh-oh-oh! Sweet love of mine”. Yet beyond the timescales shared by Chinese Democracy and the impending fifth Tool album, there is one other historical connection between these two bands.

During the 1990s, when it became apparent that Axl Rose was an infrequent visitor to the studio, a recording engineer named Billy Howerdel found a way to stay productive by forming a band with GNR’s then-drummer, Josh Freese.

The group’s name was A Perfect Circle, whose debut album, Mer de Noms, sold 1.7 million copies in the US on release in 2000, followed by another two ­albums in quick succession. The band went on hiatus in 2004, then reformed in 2010 for occasional world tours, while last year it released its fourth album, Eat the ­Elephant. Its singer and songwriter? Maynard James Keenan.

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It’s not just A Perfect Circle with which Keenan has filled the time between Tool releases and tours. He is also the frontman of a third act — an alternative rock band named Puscifer, which has ­released three albums since 2007 — and he also oversees vineyards and wineries in the small Arizona town he calls home.

Procrastination, then, is not an issue, as much as Tool fans might have wished that Keenan invested his productivity into his first musical outlet. He has often described himself as the translator between his bandmates and their audience.

“I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell,” he said in 2002. “The melody is what I gravitate to — and it’s my job to listen to what’s happening when those guys go down these staccato, rhythmic, insane mathematical paths. It’s my job to soften it and bring it back to the centre, so you can listen to it without having an eye-ache.”

It was only in 2014 — eight years after the release of 10,000 Days — that Tool broke its silence by telling Rolling Stone of an ache of another sort afflicting the four musicians and affecting their creativity. The answer to what was taking so long involved one of the least appealing but most essential aspects of the music industry: lawyers.

First, in 2007, long-time artistic collaborator Cam de Leon — who designed the cover artworks for 1993 debut Undertow and 1996’s Aenima — brought a lawsuit against Tool that alleged he was in effect the fifth member of the band, and a partner, and head of its art department.

“There is no art department,” said guitarist Adam Jones at the time. “We’ve been fighting it and it’s been really burning a hole in my stomach. It’s just been very distracting.”

Things then got much worse: the insurance company that Tool thought would defend it against lawsuits instead sued the band over technicalities regarding the case.

The band then filed a countersuit to defend against the insurer’s claims. “We bought an insurance policy for peace of mind but instead we would have been better off if we never had it and just dealt with the original lawsuit,” Jones told Rolling Stone.

The case was finally settled in the band’s favour in 2015, with the guitarist summarising the situation in hindsight as “the worst thing that’s ever happened to us”.

For the four musicians, there must have been a frustrating sense of deja vu permeating this experience: in 1998 a legal dispute with their former record label nearly ended the band.

“We were ready to bail because we weren’t making music ­together anymore,” drummer Danny Carey later said. “We’d just get together to talk about what we’re gonna do with this lawyer or that lawyer — all this business shit.”

Beyond being crippled by a series of depositions, briefs, litigators and judges, the creative process of the three musicians tends to proceed slowly, to put it mildly. Carey, Jones and bassist Justin Chancellor work together by jamming ideas for hours on end, then playing back the recordings to workshop how they might fit within song structures. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Combine that glacial pace with busy, middle-aged lives — Carey is 58, while Chancellor is the youngest at 47 — and the fact that Keenan is only willing to write melodies and lyrics once the other three members have set the music in stone, and the gaping abyss between album releases starts to make a little more sense.

For founding bassist Paul D’Amour, that approach became ­repellent — hence why he left the band in 1995 during the recording of Aenima. Since that point, the songs have only gotten longer and more complex, as befitting a progressive metal band for whom 10- and 15-minute arrangements are the norm.

“Their creative process is excruciating and tedious, and I guess I never felt the desire to play a riff 500 times before I can confirm that it’s good,” D’Amour told Bass Player magazine in 2014. “That’s why it takes them eight years to write an album.”

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And so, finally, to Fear Inoculum. Non-disclosure agreements ­demanding secrecy from all and sundry mean that, at the time of this writing, three weeks out from its release, its title, cover art and release date are the only facts known. Everything else is as unseen and unfathomable as the base of an iceberg.

The extreme weight of the wait surrounding its release is likely to be met with strong commercial performances around the world. When 10,000 Days was released in 2006, the excitement was such that record stores held midnight launch events for eager listeners.

Like 2001 release Lateralus before it, that album reached No 1 on the ARIA charts in Australia, and achieved platinum certification indicating sales in excess of 70,000 copies. In the US, Tool’s past two albums both sold more than 500,000 copies in the first week, securing No 1 debuts on the Billboard chart, while all four albums have sold a combined 13.4 million copies, according to Nielsen Music.

While those numbers are relics from another era, before streaming music accounted for two-thirds of the popular music market, the rarity of the occasion later this month might be enough to again prompt significant sales of physical product.

Judging by its past releases, the band is dedicated to investing in high-quality artwork: 10,000 Days won a Grammy for best recording package in 2007, thanks to the unique decision to attach a pair of stereoscopic eyeglasses to the CD, through which images in the booklet appeared to be three-dimensional.

Yet for all the intrigue and mystery surrounding one of the longest and strangest gaps in a popular recording career, the heaviest weight of expectation associated with Fear Inoculum is the quality of its music.

In 2008 Spin editor Steve Kandell wrote of Chinese Democracy: “The only way the record could have lived up to its legend would have been to never come out at all; that it is instead merely, ultimately, a fair-to-middling rock album is nothing to get mad at.”

Since any discussion of Tool relies heavily on measurements of passing moments — from its lengthy song arrangements to its preference for shifting time signatures, and even a 2001 song that contains the repeated lines “Wait it out / Be patient” — it somehow makes perfect sense that, when it comes to determining the true legacy and value of its fifth studio album, only time will tell.

Fear Inoculum is released on August 30 via RCA Records/Sony Music Australia.