Tool rocked Saturday's sold-out house at the UH's Andrews Amphitheatre, and did it without one whit of star posturing or exhorting the audience to join them in the usual rock 'n' roll calisthenics. But there was plenty of what a friend of mine quipped "sturm und sturm," storm and more storm. Tool’s dark and stormy night
Review by Gary C.W. Chun
gchun@starbulletin.comThrough eight years of playing live, right through this, the last show of the band's current tour, Adam Jones, Maynard James Keenan and Danny Carey, along with newest member Justin Chancellor, have remained uncompromised. Tool panders to no one, and the band is popular enough that the audience at least tolerates their unorthodox presentation.
Coming into the venue, there was a sign taped to the side of the tickets tent with a plea from the band asking concertgoers to refrain from moshing and crowd surfing to prevent injury. As expected, that didn't happen, but for the most part, it looked to be a relatively peaceful concert, what with no beer garden on the grounds, no alcoholic beverages being allowed into the concert and the occasional rain.
The band came through with a tight set, one in sync with the projected video that illustrated their songs with either abstract, computer-generated imagery or snippets of the Adam Jones music videos shot for MTV.
(Before going on, to correct my Friday preview story, the band did make up its canceled 1995 Big Mele by playing a reportedly great show later that year at After Dark.)
Apparently, the lack of direct stage lighting on the members of Tool held true back then as it did now. The band was basically illuminated with back lights, Carey and his drum kit being the most visible. Besides watching his amazing drumming, the only things you could see on stage besides the video was a dimly lit Jones and Chancellor on either side of the stage, Keenan's near silhouette (although you could see that his head was shaven and he was clothed only in tight, black shorts), his lithe form writhing to the music's primal ferocity.
It was appropriate that Keenan thanked the group's video director for his visual contribution to the tour's concerts, because it was apparent that Tool wasn't going to detract from its powerful music by becoming more visible than necessary. While Keenan did all of the occasional and cordial stage patter Saturday, the staging made it clear that he's not Tool's frontman, but an equal member of this unit.So it was that the music and videos, beginning with the second song, "Stinkfest," carried this concert. In order to stay in sync with the live performance, the video director would visually "scratch" the unsettling imagery, going back-and-forth until the video could progress in time with the song. Keenan wittily took a lyrical quote from the Elvis Presley hit "Suspicious Minds" during the instrumental break.
"Schism," the single off Tool's latest album "Lateralus," was a well-received fever dream as stark, black-and-white, male-and-female anatomies were peeled away to reveal the dark mysteries of their psyches.
As bass frequencies rumbled through concertgoers' bodies, Tool kicked into the sturm of one of its '93 debut hit "Sober," with unsettling imagery of a human eye being prepared for an operation looping on video screens.
From there, things quieted for the mystical "Disposition," as an underwater ballet video played, blue stage lights slowly sweeping over the audience. As on the album, Tool segued to "Reflection," a sinewy, recurring nightmarish scenario with a mind-awakening James solo and an especially keening vocal by Keenan. The band let the song slow to an end, with a hypnotic repeating guitar figure by Jones, and then emptiness.
And it really was relatively quiet. While the band recollected offstage, a video played with an abstract rotating figure, arms akimbo, over a black background, while the audience waited for the band's return. They came back, one by one, slowly joining in with the prog-rock instrumental "Triad," with more action in the mosh pit."We are Jukebox, thank you very much for coming," quipped Keenan as the rain started to come down harder. That magic moment when the band and audience click happened during "Aenima." There seemed to be more pogoing to this apocalyptic tune than before, bodies moving to the insistent groove all the way to the back of the amphitheater.
After that song exhausted everyone, Keenan quipped, "God is peeing on us," before thanking the audience "for sharing this warm, moist moment." He went on to say that he hoped that the concert would be a catalyst for positive inspirations.
The evening ended with the hard crunch of "Lateralus," the optimistic lyrics of looking to live with infinite possibilities, pushing the envelope and "reaching to embrace whatever may come" buoyed by the elemental, bone-crushing intensity of the music.
An encore would have been superfluous. Tool had given its all.
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