Tool ... are they really all that good ?

Lets face it some bands like shall I say for example Fates Warning or Shadow Gallery and  several others have produced some great work  ! but you wont likely walk past the guy in your local shopping mall and see him wearing a fates warning T shirt nor will they sell them in K mart

Neil Peart From Rush said in the lyrics of the song Roll The Bones  (remember it ? it had that rap bit in the middle) " Good Work is the Key to good fortune"  He also said "sometimes the winner takes nothing"  I find so often in prog the later to be the most likely,   lets face reality progressive rock/metal must be a real turkey to try and market remember most mainstream music consumers don`t care about terms like counterpoint or rhythmic syncopation,  whats a Moog solo ? who needs a bell tree anyway ..   all they want is what their "friends" think is "cool" or something they can   4/4   dance to.

In History The artist has always been made suffer   

even Van Gogh once said when he was alive " if I could only get back the cost of the canvas"  

So  my question is do you feel the band Tool has had an easy go when we consider the output of their work and the quality overall ? 

are Tool really all that good ?  




Edited by Masque - January 17 2007 at 06:07

Lateralus and Aenima are simply perfect masterpieces, worth every bit of praise they get and much more 10,000 Says is a bit weaker but it's still great. So yea, they're that good, at least I think so. A matter of personal taste really.

Can't stand them

Harry Hood wrote: Aenima is their only great album. All of the songs are concise and powerful, and it flows really well. Lateralus is good, but the songs seem to drag on for too long. They're basically a King Crimson tribute band, they've even admitted it themselves. Practically all of their songs sound like some varation of "Easy Money", "Discipline", or a combination of the two.

they can't even pull off the crimsonic chord changes... all of their work seems to be rooted in one minor key with obvious transitions. Tool are very good at the rhythmic side of composition but for all that they'll never write anything a quarter as good as Fracture.

I like to listen to Tool from time to time. poetic sentence, no?

No, they are not that good....THEY ARE EVEN BETTER!!! And that comes from a guy who listens mainly to sympho and rio...

I should probably listen to them more carefully. So far, I've only heard "Lateralus" and "10,000 Days". The former is rather good, though a bit samey; while I found the latter positively dull. However, as I said above, I can't say I have listened to either of them very often - which is in itself a rather bad sign as far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't in any case go so far as to say they're worthless.

For several reasons, Tool gets a huge spotlight thrown on it. I guess some reasons might be that a) they're hugely popular, b) they take so long to put out a new album and c) many people (including myself and other posters in this thread) think that they peaked at Aenima.

I know, some people just don't like them much. That's fine. It's frustrating to see all the hate they get, though, considering that they're one of the few truly unique and innovative bands in prog-metal. The majority of bands in prog-metal sound like Dream Theater rip-offs, to me anyway.

Do they deserve all the hype and attention they get? Maybe not, but at least a talented prog band IS getting a lot of attention these days. The more people that listen to this stuff as opposed to, you know, Britney Spears or something, the better.

At their best (Aenima, Lateralus) yes, they are that good. On the other releases they're quite good, but not groundbreaking.  What is definitely not that good about them is the lyrics (with a few exceptions). Do they sound samey? No.

  Tool... are they really that good? YES, they are. Listen to their music with an open mind. And you'll see.

Yes. I ain't Metal fan(neither Prog nor Alternative where TOOL seemed to belong) mostly ,but they're my favourite Metal band."10 000 Days" is The album of the year for me (glad to see it takes #5 in Collabs' choise).
The title track is simply a masterpiece.