Released: September 18, 1996
Tool have plenty of people to be pissed off with on Ænima: celebrities, self-appointed martyrs, and fans who mistake buying a record for owning the band. Maynard James Keenan has something unpleasant for all of them. The more interesting moments come when he runs out of other people to blame. Can the anger driving this album lead anywhere if the person expressing it never changes?
Released in 1996, Tool’s second studio album was their first with bassist Justin Chancellor, joining Keenan, guitarist Adam Jones and drummer Danny Carey. Produced by Tool and David Bottrill, it gives the four musicians room to move independently. The bass stays audible beneath the distorted guitar, and Carey’s drums have enough space for the smaller rhythmic details to register between the big hits.
That clarity makes the repetition in “Stinkfist” particularly uncomfortable. Jones’s clipped guitar figure keeps returning while Keenan shifts from a low, constricted delivery into sustained melodic phrases. The bodily imagery becomes more invasive as the appetite for sensation grows. Each chorus briefly opens the song up, then the grinding verse pattern returns. There is release, but no lasting satisfaction. The person demanding more ends up exactly where he started.
“Forty Six & 2” takes that frustration inward. Chancellor’s opening bass figure curls around a recurring low note, with Jones placing short guitar accents around it. Carey gradually increases the activity beneath them until the drums take the foreground. The lyrics’ fixation on the shadow and shedding skin makes the repeated bass pattern sound almost stubborn: Keenan wants to change, yet keeps circling the same thoughts. As the arrangement becomes busier, that familiar figure gives you something to follow through the disruption.
Tool are less reflective when somebody questions their integrity. “Hooker with a Penis” tears into a fan’s accusation of selling out, with a blunt guitar riff and Keenan’s increasingly ragged delivery leaving little room for discussion. But his defence includes an admission: he sold something, and the fan bought it. Neither gets to pretend otherwise. The song is funny because Keenan sounds so personally offended while dismantling the idea that the listener ever knew him personally.
“Ænema” makes that outward anger much easier to join. The lurching guitar rhythm leaves openings for Keenan’s catalogue of Los Angeles grievances, then his longer vocal phrases give the imagined catastrophe an almost welcoming quality. By the repeated swimming instruction, disgust has become a singalong. The fantasy is absurd, vicious, and convenient. Having the ocean swallow everyone you dislike would save a lot of uncomfortable conversations with yourself.
The jokes elsewhere complicate the album’s spiritual searching. “Intermission” introduces a jaunty organ melody that becomes the distorted opening riff of “jimmy.” The notes are familiar; their character changes immediately. That little bait-and-switch also stops the record from settling into one long stretch of earnest intensity. Tool can spend minutes building an atmosphere and still interrupt it with a cheap grin.
“Third Eye” makes the search for understanding sound considerably less amusing. Following the Bill Hicks samples, the arrangement moves through low rumbling, abrasive guitar noise, quieter melodic passages, and sudden full-band eruptions. Keenan repeatedly forces his voice upward, sounding increasingly strained as the song stretches on. There is nothing comfortable about the perspective he is trying to reach.
So can Ænima’s anger lead anywhere? Only when Keenan subjects himself to the scrutiny he gives everyone else. “Stinkfist” exposes an appetite that cannot be satisfied; “Forty Six & 2” wrestles with the habits of the person wanting change. By “Third Eye,” even seeing differently takes work. Imagining Los Angeles underwater is the easy part. The harder songs leave him alive, implicated, and still trying to sort himself out.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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