One of the great cult groups of the 1990s, Tool are an enduring mystery. Their current album, 10,000 Days, went to No 1 in the American chart and sold nearly half-a-million copies in its first week of release. Last Friday they topped the bill at the Download Festival. But the arthouse-metal band from Los Angeles, led by the singer Maynard James Keenan, remain shrouded in a dense fog of anti-stardust.
Their Hammersmith show was one of the darkest and heaviest performances by a rock act that I can recall. It was also one of the least demonstrative or entertaining in a conventional sense.
Stationed in the shadows on a platform beside the drum riser at the back, Keenan was all but invisible for long stretches of the gig. While the drummer Danny Carey hammered his huge, double-bass drum kit with a natural flamboyance, the guitarist Adam Jones and bass player Justin Chancellor had the studied air of sidemen pushed out to the front.
As the wailing, feedback drone of Lost Keys gave way to the pulverising riff of Rosetta Stoned, molten shapes writhed on the screens at the back. Images of old men, humanoid creatures with reptilian skins and an eviscerated alien crawled across the screen at various times as the show unfolded. Schism, a song with vaguely Eastern modalities and a weird rhythmic structure delivered with the force of an industrial pump, was followed by the equally hefty riffing of Sober. Tortured souls stared out from landscapes that recalled scenes from Dante’s Inferno as Keenan, stripped to the waist and sporting a mohican, sang tales of physical and spiritual degradation in a voice that was sometimes tuneful, sometimes mechanical. Ænema was a thunderous call for Los Angeles to be “flushed away” by earthquake and flood, which had the crowd emphasising the end of each line with a forest of jabbing fingers. It was like peering in on the ritual of a Masonic cabal.