Live review: Tool’s surprising, fan-pleasing choices as Good Things headliner
As this US progressive metal band powered through an invigorating and uplifting 105-minute performance, unpredictability was Tool’s most prized asset. | LIVE REVIEW
It’s said that you can never step into the same stream twice: you are necessarily changed each time you do so, as is the stream.
Watching US progressive metal band Tool headline Good Things festival at the Brisbane Showgrounds on a muggy, drizzly Sunday night, I was there in body as a 37-year-old music journalist, but my past self was there in spirit, too: the 14-year-old who first saw these same four master musicians play inside an arena across town in 2002 and was forever changed.
More than any other, Tool is the band that formed the beating heartbeat of my music fandom as an impressionable pre-teen, since I encountered an enthusiastic champion for their music via an online video game message board in the early 2000s. I became a devout disciple, an ambassador who turned my friends on to this music, too, because sharing my passion for my favourite art is an innate trait I cannot shake.
At Good Things, as the band powered through an invigorating, surprising and uplifting 105-minute performance, I was utterly gripped by what I was seeing and hearing, having spent about 25 years knowing Tool’s songs as intimately as I know myself.
In the lead-up to this show, I took up arms in the battle familiar to all music fans ahead of seeing a former favourite band live in concert. The intent is to try to avoid previous setlist spoilers that remove the thrill of spontaneity; try to temper expectations so you’re not crushed if they’re not met, and try not to anticipate anything other than the moment when the lights go down and the immersion begins.
The biggest enemy of touring musicians is age. They can never step into the same stream twice, either: a 64-year-old drummer attempting to play the same parts he wrote as a younger man has his work cut out for him, as does a 61-year-old singer.
But neither Danny Carey nor Maynard James Keenan exhibited signs of wear and tear on Sunday – their third successive festival headline set following shows in Melbourne (Friday) and Sydney (Saturday).
This pair’s durability was shocking, really, given the intricacies of the percussion parts composed by Carey and the bottled-lightning ferocity Keenan has captured in recording studios across the decades.
Carey is simply one of the greatest drummers of all time, and as he’s aged his playing has only grown more complex. Of the 10 tracks Tool aired on Sunday, a mid-set highlight was the lengthy, twisting and towering Pneuma, one of three selections from their newest album, 2019’s Fear Inoculum.
This song, more than any other, is Carey’s masterclass: his rhythmic dexterity is one of the wonders of the modern musical world, and standing in front of the stage amid a tightly packed scrum on the field of the Showgrounds arena, it was a pure pleasure to watch him go about his work.
For decades now, Tool’s preference has been to swim against the stream: rather than beaming high-definition footage of the musicians playing live on to the big screens that flank the stage, like almost all of their arena- and stadium-sized peers, they show us immersive digital artworks.
For Pneuma – just about the trickiest and most demanding song in their repertoire – you wish they’d put a camera on Carey so we could better appreciate the intensity and virtuosity of the task he’s set himself in replaying it live. It’s an extraordinary act of concentration and musicianship.
For a musical trio, they make a beautiful noise together: bassist Justin Chancellor, 54, expertly wrestles his instrument and thrashes his body while producing a bowel-shaking low end, while 60-year-old Adam Jones’s jagged, detuned guitar riffs have long been the band’s musical guiding light, like an anglerfish leading prey astray in deep waters.
Together, their instrumentation offers a perfectly balanced mix of shaded tones and crunching rhythms, atop which Keenan’s melodies are delivered like an antidote to all that darkness.
Brisbane’s setlist offered two of the most beautiful examples of this tension-and-release. First was a track named H., from 1996’s Aenima, which offsets some of Keenan’s sweetest and most vulnerable vocals against his bandmates’ urgent climax, which gives the ending the feel of an exclamation point. Then Jambi, a 2006 track that features a mid-song diversion into the heaviest rhythmic bed of its discography, as Jones’s extraordinary talk-box guitar solo paints with a whole new colour palette before Keenan finds a closing melody that is among his finest.
As you can tell, it’s hard for me to contain myself in writing about this band. Hopefully, you’ll forgive the unusually personal nature of this review, which is written without the professional remove I usually wield like a shield as a critic. I wasn’t planning to write about this show, either, given that it was the finale of a six-date Australian visit – the band’s first trip here since 2020, just before the international borders closed.
But in keeping with that idea of stepping into streams as a different person, so it was for this band, which has disappointed me on past viewings by playing it a little too safe. As a critic, I’ve felt Tool have threatened to become a living museum artefact playing the same (or similar) sets each night, rather than remaining a living, breathing entity capable of surprising fans.
Ahead of this tour, I spoke with Chancellor about Tool’s short set at Ozzy Osbourne’s final show in July, where the quartet played in full daylight – unusual, given their preference for darkness – and took on a new challenge in learning a Black Sabbath cover, just like every other band who played that day in Birmingham.
“I think it taught us something about ourselves: that we are capable of kind of stepping up and being a bit braver, maybe, than we’ve been,” Chancellor told me back in August, as the British-born bassist approached his own 30th anniversary of joining the band.
That idea of bravery appears to have caught on: across their recent New Zealand and Australian concerts, Tool have been thrilling fans by pulling out songs thought to be long retired, including Crawl Away (last played in 1998), as well as a trio they hadn’t aired since 2002 in Prison Sex, H. and Disposition.
This element of surprise is not to be underestimated among bands with millions-strong global fanbases. It’s part of the reason followers of acts such as Pearl Jam, Jack White and Queens of the Stone Age tend to buy tickets to multiple shows: unpredictability.
There’s still a deep satisfaction to be found in performers who run practically the same setlist every night of a world tour; for example, AC/DC, whose Australian tour continues in Perth on Monday before ending in Brisbane next week.
But the Forrest Gump chocolate-box approach to setlist curation – you never know what you’re going to get – is also a major lure to get fans to put their money down.
As a leading and established alternative music festival, Good Things uncharacteristically struggled to sell out its three shows this year; for months, social media advertising had been seeking to engender FOMO in potential ticket buyers by warning of low availability.
If organisers didn’t quite manage to slap a “sold-out” sticker across their events, Brisbane must have been mighty close: the main Showgrounds arena was absolutely heaving on Sunday night, as light rain fell and a relieving thunderstorm later passed across the city, once the fans had filtered out, sweaty, smiling and sated.
With a habit of leaving lengthy gaps between tours, Tool’s return is never a sure thing, which makes their creative choices on this run of Australian shows seem all the more generous. It’s a rare gift to see a band perform 23 years apart in one’s life – a changed person – and walk away from both experiences feeling awed, inspired and grateful for what this masterly quartet continues to offer.
Little is promised to us in this life, particularly for longtime followers of progressive metal bands featuring 64-year-old drummers and 61-year-old singers.
As with a recent visit by US heavy metal titans Metallica – whose line-up also sports sexagenarians playing gruelling, complex music – Tool’s continued commitment to delivering world-class concerts is both admirable and laudable. As fans, we hope the stream never stops, even though we know it must some day.
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