For those not into progressive metal music [glances at most family and friends] who may not have heard of the band Tool, here’s the scoop.*.
When the world lost the drumming and lyric-writing brilliance of Neil Peart a few years ago, I was a bit adrift for some time about who else to look up to as the pinnacle of drummers. There was a place that had been filled by Peart for most of my life and a vacuum had suddenly shown up there. And we all know that nature (and a mind is included in that) abhors a vacuum.
After a while, when I was idly looking around online for who was considered to be exceptional, the name Danny Carey kept coming up again and again. Carey is the drummer for Tool. I’d liked a few Tool songs since their hit singles Undertow and Sober back in 1993, but didn’t know much about the band, and hadn’t given them much attention. But Huh… their drummer’s apparently really good? I figured he was worth doing a deeper dive on.
… and good… lord. I quickly found out that Carey is easily one of the best drummers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen plenty.
Better than Peart?
Debatable.
The best in the world right now?
Almost certainly.
They both definitely have their own styles, of course, each excellent in their own way. Who you may prefer overall will of course come down to personal preference. I love a lot of Rush music, and am liking more and more of Tool’s. Very tough call on which drummer is “better”.
Carey’s big on polyrhythms, where each of his limbs is playing at a different speed, but is lauded as well for use of polymetrics, where those limbs are also playing in different (plus varying) time signatures.
Yeah. Noodle on that for a minute.
More recently, in looking around for videos where I could see what Carey is doing on the drums, I came across this video, which is nothing short of drumming porn:
I won’t get into the technical aspects of what he’s doing there, mainly because many have already done videos with far more detailed breakdowns using terminology that I’d never even heard of before, so if you’re at all interested, definitely look those up. But I’ll also not get into it too much because this post is about the band as a whole, not just the beast behind the drum kit. (Having said that, if you’re a fan of seeing reaction videos where peoples’ minds melt out of their ears, there’s plenty of those videos, too, where even other professional drummers watch this same video and are at times unable to figure out how the hell he’s doing what he does. Many can’t even pin down the time signature Carey is playing in, including during stretches of more straight-forward playing.
Good stuff.)
But further on the band itself, Adam Jones and Justin Chancellor, the guitarist and bass player respectively, are excellent musicians in their own rights. Fantastic stylings, with techniques, riffs and hooks, often employing some tight, driving crunchiness that help push their songs forward. The three instruments combined offer that glorious alchemy where their whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
But then also add in Maynard James Keenan on vocals?
Whooo, boy, the vocals bring a whole other layer to everything. Morose and introspective to aggressively accusatory and wailing, adding depth and emotion and complexity to the music.
The lyrics explore everything from the base to the philosophical, from selling out artistically (Hooker with a Penis) to Jungian theories of the ultimate human evolutionary plateau (Forty Six & 2) to a gentle-to-harsh directive for a slumbering spirit-self to wake up and remember its true nature, writing that was inspired by ancient Greek lore (Pneuma).
So yeah, pretty erudite material, but always deftly handled to lend itself to the music.
… and then there’s the math that informs the music as well.
Check out this video about one specific song called Lateralus, particularly between 00:50 and 6:53. Buckle in, because this gets pretty wild:
… I mean… what?
Oh, and if that’s not obsessive enough a song-writing process for you, how about this other beauty, which I recently heard about on Alan Cross’s excellent Ongoing History of New Music show, episode 360 (Hidden Tracks and Other Sundry), in which listeners can create a hidden song:
Take the title track of Tool’s 10,000 Days album, which runs 11 minutes and 13 seconds.
Then layer another song from the album on top of that, called Wings For Marie, so they start and play at the same time. Wings For Marie runs for six minutes and 11 seconds.
Right after Wings For Marie finishes (and with 10,000 Days is still going), play a third song from the album called Vigniti Tres. It runs five minutes and two seconds.
Six minutes and 11 seconds plus five minutes and two seconds gives you 11 minutes and 13 seconds, so those two layered songs will end precisely when 10,000 Days does. And it all syncs perfectly as an entirely new song. Everything fits together: Tempo, key, flow, breakdown, transitions… they mesh with and complement each other perfectly to create a whole new song.
No wonder it takes Tool years between releasing new records.
That kind of crazy attention to detail only deepens my appreciation of a band whose music is becoming more and more appealing. It’s proving to be quite a rabbit hole I’ve stumbled across. One I’m only too happy to keep exploring.
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*I’m still no fan of Wikipedia, but for at least summaries (that should be taken with a big grain of salt until fact-checked elsewhere), it’s still handy at times.
In reading this post, it struck me that you might really dig “Hearing Songs For the First Time” – a YouTube Channel where drummers… hear… songs for… the first time. It’s not just a clever name. Basically, top notch drummers hear a song for the first time with the drums removed, and on one listen (at least generally), they then do some composing, and play along with that track. Even for someone not familiar with the nuances of drumming, it is pretty fascinating. Link: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLThYwnIoLwyWiF5RgHPzOzYNdqQw1-tep
Thank for the suggestion, good sir.
I’ve checked a bunch of those out — the Drumeo ones in particular — though not nearly all of them. And I didn’t know there was a whole channel dedicated to it. But of course there is.
What I found interesting was they seemed to have two main approaches to it: One was letting a drummer listen to a song they’d never heard before, often in a genre that wasn’t their forte. And the challenge was for the drummer, after a pass or two at listening, to try to match the drumming in the song. That in itself was pretty cool.
Then I saw other types where they played a song for the drummer, but without the drumming parts included at all, and asked the drummer to come up with what they think would work for it. I saw a few drummers do that (all quite well), and then I saw the one with Chad Smith hearing 30 Seconds To Mars, where he listens to the (drumless) song for I think it’s 36-37 seconds and then just jumps right in, and absolutely nails it. Like, the guys in the booth, the ones who came up with this whole idea and have already seen this kind of thing dozens of times by that point, are blown away by what he’s doing, almost perfectly playing along with it while he’s listening to it for the first time.
In the same vein, I’ve seen professional drummers reacting to that same video with Chad Smith, and they don’t get how he’s doing it so well on the fly.
So, so good.