Review by SilentScream213 for Tool - Ænima (1996)

I don’t hate Tool or anything, and they absolutely have some fantastic tracks under their belt (Sober, Schism, etc.) but I find them to be one of the most overrated bands out there. Ænima is a perfect example of everything wrong with Tool in my opinion.

Firstly, there are NO standout tracks. Zero. Nothing on here has a chorus or a riff or anything that is going to stick with you. None of the songs have any strong moods, emotions, atmosphere, etc. It’s all very gray… Just the band playing some technical stuff while Maynard rambles on and on about something. Pretentious doesn’t begin to cover it.

Then there’s the fact that this thing is littered with useless interludes. It’s another shot at being “clever.” And damn they fooled a lot of people. The only time this many interlude tracks are acceptable is on a concept album where the interludes move along the story or connect the themes in some way. Here, we’ve got 6 interlude tracks, about 11 minutes of pointless nonsense that the most rabid Tool fans would defend as showcasing how we make assumptions based on the sound of things, even if the meaning is totally different… The thing is, I don’t care. I don’t care about whatever inside jokes or rabid drug induced revelations compelled them to make over a third of the tracks gimmicks. All I care about is how good the album sounds, and the album sounds like a mess.

The meat of the album is decent, but again, there’s no staying power, no reason to come back to it. The lyrics tread an odd line between humorous sarcasm and total existential pretention… neither of which I enjoy. I’ll stick to their hits, but Tool albums are not well crafted and this is perhaps their worst offender.