Tool - AEnema

Release Date: September 17, 1996

★★★★★ Tracks:

Forty-Six & 2

AEnima

My introduction to Tool was through the frightening video for “Sober” that frequented MTV in 1993. You know the one; a puppet even more disturbing than something from a Tim Burton movie mopes around a few ugly rooms and eventually shakes his hand uncontrollably. As a thirteen year old tuning in to watch Alternative Nation and Headbanger’s Ball as often as I could, seeing the video for “Sober” was similar to catching Friday the 13th or A Nighmare on Elm Street, the scary imagery and controversial subject matter (“Jesus, won’t you fucking whistle / Something but what’s past and done?”) scared me a little, but the taboo-qualities the video embodied invariably made it cool. With the parental advisory sticker as big and bright as day on the cover of Undertow, my parents wouldn’t dare buy me a copy. My friend Mike’s parents weren’t so strict however, and when I first heard the record another one of the tracks immediately caught my ear; “Prison Sex,” which would become a music video as well, we dug for the same reasons we enjoyed “Sober” -- it had a few cool riffs and it was kind of disgusting (“I have found some type of temporary sanity / In this shit, blood and cum on my hands.”).

By high school I had all but forgotten about Tool until I heard a new song of theirs circulating the airwaves sometime in 1997, and the eight-minute long “Eulogy” appealed to my anti-theistic views enough for me to go out and grab a copy. Initially I was floored, and for quite a few months there I couldn’t take the fucking thing out of my CD player. And so this is where I feel the need to preface my story: I was really in to LSD for most of my senior year. I mean it. We used to drop nearly every Saturday night, we’d drop during school field trips, we’d drop during road trips to Orlando, we’d even drop at school. It's not something I'm necessarily proud of but I'd be lying if I said it wasn't a dominant aspect of my life when Tool was in the rotation, and with songs about wishing on the apocalypse, prying open a third eye, false martyrdom, and how Tool and Bill Hicks both agree hallucinogenics are good for music, AEnema represented the soundtrack to an LSD trip.

Having only heard AEnima a handful of times over the past decade I was looking forward to its entry in to the blog. A few times through and the instrumentation is just as good as I remembered it. Adam Jones, who most would agree isn’t a virtuoso, has a way of blending dropped tunings, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and pedal effects to gives Tool’s music its distinction. Danny Carey, on the other hand, is one of the greatest rock drummers of all time, to hear him use his wide array of toms and cymbals, implementing double bass while occasionally guiding the group through odd time signatures is phenomenal. Justin Chancellor fleshes out the low levels with great bass lines that often sit at the forefront of Tool’s songs. With “H.” and “Stinkfist” I immediately hear what drew me in; there are some truly memorable hooks here. “Forty-Six & 2” has one of the best drum solos in contemporary rock music (whatever happened to drum solos anyways?), and “AEnema,” the most popular track included, has a legendary breakdown filled with images of tidal waves and meteors.

But overall revisiting Tool has led to disappointment. The problem resides in James Maynard’s vocals. I no longer relate to this shit at thirty years old. When I hear Bill Hicks’ speech and Maynard’s lyrics on “Third Eye,” I’m embarrassed that I spent so much time trying to decipher the philosophical (i.e. trippy) meaning behind its story. I’m not sure what all the snake imagery is supposed to suggest in “Forty-Six & 2” and “H,” but it just sounds corny. “Eulogy,” the song that got me to buy this record in the first place makes me cringe now; what used to sound like fist-pumping opposition to Christianity when I was seventeen years old as Maynard sings, “Come down / Get off your fucking cross / We need the fucking space / To nail the next fool martyr,” now sounds cold and offensive. And that’s just the problem: Tool is a band focused on social commentary, but their overall execution is poor. “Eulogy” could have been a great piece of religious criticism, instead it’s a seething attack on Jesus. “Stinkfist” appears to be a critique on over-stimulation, but its metaphorical relationship to fisting is overkill. Then there’s “Prison Sex,” a song that I thought was so cool as a kid because of its foul language is now utterly disturbing knowing the lyrics revolve around sexual child abuse.

I guess as I’ve grown up, I’ve grown out of some of the more pissed-off music I listened to. Unlike Beck's Odelay or Sublime's 40 oz., Tool doesn't remind me of the good times I was having with my buddies in senior year of high school, getting drunk and high and laughing my ass off, Tool reminds me of the trouble I was having with my family and friends, and the anxious uncertainty of where life was taking me after graduation. My only Tool fix going forward will probably come from their third single, "AEnema," the one song included that combines its social commentary with a little wit.

Vetiver - Tight Knit

Release Date: February 17, 2009

★★★★★ Tracks:

Through the Front Door

Gone are the woodsy, fall sounds of Vetiver. The cellos and violins are silent. The guest collaborations from Banhart, Newsom and others are missing. This time around Andy Cabric elicits the warm tones of summer to try and craft a more inviting album. They add percussion to nearly every track, and experiment with electric guitars. The songwriting is more pop-oriented, as songs like “Sister” and “More of This” will leave you forgetting you are listening to a folk outfit. And while Tight Knit succeeds in being much more accessible than their debut, it’s also more generic. There isn’t much variance between what's here and what most alternative-folk enthusiasts already have in their libraries: “Rolling Sea” brings early Ryan Adams to mind, “Everyday” should appeal to Badly Drawn Boy fans, and “On the Other Side” sounds like a song produced by the plethora of current Calexico-style country rockers you've already heard. There is one song I’ll be sure to keep however, and although “Through the Front Door” could fit snugly on Beck’s Sea Change, I just can’t get past how damn gorgeous it is.

The Wrens - The Meadowlands

Release Date: September 9, 2003

★★★★★ Tracks:

Happy

This Boy is Exhausted

Every Year You Wasted

Boys You Won't Remember

I'll never get tired of a good break-up song. Fortunately the relationship I am currently in is still going strong. I'm not sure how she puts up with me, but no doubt I owe a lot to my experiences in the one other serious relationship I had, of which ended awfully. I'm sure most are familiar with the one I'm referring to: a relationship that everyone else but yourself and the person you are with can see will only end in complete misery. Still, it was my first love, and there was something good that came out of the whole mess. I passed that universal challenge everyone goes through at least once, and made it out the other side (after a few months of sulking and binge drinking, of course). It was like a right of passage in to adulthood -- an emotional badge of honor I could carry throughout the rest of my life.

Now I'm at the point where those feelings of hopelessness have completely diminished, and after not experiencing something so tumultuous as my first heartbreak in many, many years, I find myself occasionally even missing those newly acquired emotions. I became much more creative, buried myself in my studies, and most importantly, I finally truly understood all those great break-up albums for the first time. Blood On the Tracks turned out to be amazing, Beck's Sea Change was almost too heartbreaking to play all the way through, but I got it. Yes, perhaps it's just an immature (and most assuredly emo) romanticism of a completely unromantic situation, but I can't be the only one to think this way. No way every break-up record that's ever been sold could've gone to some poor bastard who just got dumped (right?...). And that's one of the thing that's so universally great about the break-up song: those of us going through one have someone to commiserate with, and those of us that have cleared that major hurdle life throws at us can look back and reminisce.

And that brings me to one of my favorite break-up songs of all time, "Happy" by the Wrens. The lyrics aren't earth-shattering, and by American Idol standards the singer doesn't have the strongest of voices, but this song is powerful: the instrumentation slowly building from beginning to end, the vocals sung with more and more emotion as each verse passes, until everything crescendos in to a poppy finale, possibly signifying the singer's success in getting over his heartache (or so he contends in his lyrics):



One of the other things I love about the Wrens is that they have more than one singer, giving us multiple perspectives on a single album. As I've gotten older, I've increasingly identified with the vocalist from "This Boy is Exhausted." A song about growing up and not being where you pictured you'd be as a kid, I think many a disgruntled nine-to-fiver can relate. Sure I went to college, and I can type, but a cushy desk job isn't where I dreamed I'd be (although I shouldn't complain too much since a lot of this post was typed at that very desk). It's always been my dream to write and record music, and at least the Wrens are doing that.

"Lock me in.
Tied to work.
Splitting rock
Cutting diamonds.
100 days.
With no pay.
Not anymore.
Cause I'm caught.
I can't type.
I can't temp.
I'm way past college.
No ways out.
No back doors.
Not anymore.
.......
But then once a while.
We'll play a show.
Then it makes it worthwhile.
Our sights set low.
As Jerry squares off the set here we go.
But... this boy is exhausted."

The Meadowlands isn't the happiest of records. These guys have gotten older and jaded, and it's clearly displayed here on the record. For those of you who never like to experience occasional feelings of melancholia, this record is most likely not for you. And while most of my favorite tracks are the moodier slow jams, the Wrens lighten the mood with a few fun poppy tracks like "Faster Gun," "Shot Rock-Splitter to God" and "Nervous and Not Me." As for the music, if you don't mind nasally voices and production on a budget, you aren't going to find much better power-pop than what the Wrens offer here on The Meadowlands. There are some great arrangements, great use of dueling guitars, and great percussion, which sometimes falls to the wayside in pop bands like this. Provided by drummer, Jerry MacDonald, one of my favorite tracks, "Boys You Won't Remember," is a perfect example of his contribution to the band, with the drums single-handedly (or I guess doubly-handed would be the better term) sonically amplifying the song through each verse, giving the track its slow-building momentum.

Released in 2003, Meadowlands was largely recorded and produced in 1999, but due to label problems, it didn't make it's way to the public until four years later, minus the newly problematic "internet leaks" bands are now continually plagued with. However the four year delay only added to the anticipation, and they did not disappoint. Meadowlands is considered their best by most fans and critics alike, topping many lists of the year and decade by a few popular publications. As we know from the lyrics, these guys have day jobs, and they're probably closing in on their 40's, but I hope they find the time to come across the river and play another show soon, word is they put on quite the live performance.