We waited 13 years for this album. A few weeks sounds fine.

I'll be here

That song is very, very Tool.

I like. Like a lot of Tool's stuff.

I could've ID'd it as Tool right when the drums came in.

I'm waiting for a good time to zone out and focus on listening to this with nobody else in the room.

How about now?

This needs to go the fuck away. There's a woman called Sylvia at pottery this semester. Every time I think about pottery....

One of my buddy's favorite songs...:neutral:

Wanna get your dick knocked off by a snare drum, listen to the album version of the Eagles-- I Can't Tell You Why. ( can't find a copy on YouTube )

That snare drum sounds like it will move your woofer cone.

A little digging and people seem to think Don Henley was using a Ludwig 402 Supraphonic. That's a 14" x 6.5" in chrome-plated aluminum.

Listening now on Spotify, it's a remaster but the sound is still pretty huge.

It makes the song feel like it's dragging a little. We have to wait for the decay to move along

I watched a video about professional sounding back beats needing to have high velocity at the tip of the stick. Which means on a slow track like this, you have to massively delay executing the strike, because you'll be whipping the stick into the snare to get the high velocity needed for a back that has conviction. It's almost like ballet, the movements you do with your body to get your stick in the right place at the right time. I'm a big fan of "dancing" behind the kit.

And yes, Lumber Jim, the Tool track was a real trip to listen to. It's all about a progression of textures getting layered on each other in a sequence that paints a mental picture. Hearing the track for the first time I didn't know where they were going when an instrument began the first phase of a new part coming in, but then once the momentum built up it made perfect sense. And I wondered, is this what listening to this band was always like? I just don't remember hearing a Tool song that I didn't already know where the parts were going.

They always have seemed to creep up on me too. I'm liking it more and more. The hooks are more subtle on this new album... But they're there.

Layers. On top of layers.

That describes Tool, overall, pretty well.

This last album uses a lot of track time to build some of those layers. Tool has (or seems to have) always had long tracks, but I was still a little surprised at how long these tracks are. And the number of long tracks.

You know how some songs have a cool intro that is, like conceptually disconnected from the real beginning of the song, and when the song comes in it's unexpected, because the 1 isn't where you thought it was going to be, or something?

I think Tool tries to do that over and over and over, the whole song. You never know what's coming up, it's unexpected every time.

Here's a song where all the chords and important stuff in the intro and chorus section happens directly on the 1 (count ONE two-three, ONE two-three). It's a "symphony in 1" where the harmonies between the guitar chords and bass notes is strong enough to carry everything. The second half of the song d i s i n t e g r a t e s for two minutes.

Like all my favorite albums, this was their last one before breaking up.