It’s been a long time coming, but Tool finally put out new music. Fear Inoculum has been officially released for public consumption.
If you’re a Tool fan already, you’ve likely already listened to Fear Inoculum. If you’re not a Tool fan, but like heavy, progressive rock from four musicians who are very good at their craft, give Fear Inoculum a listen. In fact, you should give Tool’s whole catalog a listen.
Fear Inoculum feels very guitar-driven. That may sound like an obvious thing to say about a rock album, but Tool is somewhat of a different beast. Adam’s guitar parts are one after the other on every song. Fear Inoculum sounds like a guitar player who hasn’t had an outlet for his guitar ideas and riffs he’s been working on for the last 13 years, and is trying to get them all on one album. This isn’t a negative criticism of Adam’s playing on the album at all, as it may be some of his best stuff, but it feels like his playing drives this one more so than Tool’s other offerings.
Maynard doesn’t have many standout moments. I was waiting for it to happen, but it never really did. There are a couple moments on Fear Inoculum (the song) and Pneuma, but he seems content going long periods of time with no vocals. There are no jaw-dropping Rosetta Stoned moments on this album from Maynard. It’s a little disappointing because his vocals have the ability to change the landscape of a song and make you weep.
Maynard has set the bar so high for himself, it’s almost not fair to judge him by his past efforts – but, as a fan, you can’t help it. So it’s not to say Maynard’s vocals on Fear Inoculum are poor by any stretch. They’re quite good, but nothing that makes you fathom your existence in a new way, or transports you to the outer reaches of another plane of being (which they’ve been known to do). As a result, Fear Inoculum feels like the most instrumental of Tool’s albums. Maynard turns in merely a great performance, as opposed to a legendary one.
Justin and Danny are rock-solid and pound their way through this whole album. Danny even gets (gasp) a drum solo! He seems to be in solo mode on a couple other songs as well, which isn’t something we’ve seen much of before on a Tool album. Justin elegantly fleshes out, and sometimes guts, the bottom end of their sound start to finish, depending on what the songs need. They both sound great.
There isn’t one radio-friendly song on Fear Inoculum. Not even close. Usually, a Tool album will have at least a couple songs radio can get their hands around. Songs like Stinkfist, Sober, H., Prison Sex, Parabola, Vicarious are shorter, more digestible content that radio has used in the past to showcase Tool’s sound. There isn’t anything like that on Fear Inoculum. All the songs are ten-plus minutes. The radio stations are going to have to do some serious editing to even get them down to the five-minute mark. I don’t know how they’re going to do it without making the songs unrecognizable.
Fear Inoculum was worth the 13-year wait, and like every other Tool fan, I hope this isn’t the last new music we get from them, given how long this album took to come out. I know they’re getting older, and they all have families now, but I’m hoping Danny, Justin, Adam, and Maynard have at least one more album’s worth of new music left in them.
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