![]() ![]() "Sober" is easily the album's heartbeat - a masterpiece of tension and release. Times, in attempting to praise the emotional resonance of "Sober," delivered the song a backhanded compliment, writing that it "introduces an element of poignancy to go with the customary grunge-rock dread." topped the Billboard 200 that year.) And the entire music industry - from radio programmers to critics to record executives - seemed unsure how to categorize the quartet. (At this point, grunge was in its final run of dominance: Both Nirvana's In Utero and Pearl Jam's Vs. Singles like "Sober" and "Prison Sex" - in heavy MTV rotation thanks in part to their brooding, stop-motion-animated videos - sounded like nothing else in heavy music. (Just listen to the way his voice slithers around the word "stumbling" in fluid, dramatic swoops - the melodic equivalent of cursive writing.) ![]() The small arrangement details matter as much as the riffs: the stoner-rock fuzz tone on "Bottom," the sitar jangle that opens "4°," the furious double-time climax of "Flood," the thrash-metal breakdown of "Crawl Away," Carey's nimble cymbal work on "Swamp Song," Keenan's unconventional vocal pattern on the same cut. Working again with Opiate producer-mixer Sylvia Massey, they reached a new level of studio craft, exploring a breadth of tonal colors. Undertow, indeed, launched their obsession with tricky time signatures - but, crucially, also widescreen production and cinematic arrangements. In this context, opener "Intolerance" is the first signature Tool song, with Jones unfurling crunchy, palm-muted riffs over adventurous, off-kilter rhythms. But at the same time we were quickly growing and some of the more adventurous stuff on Undertow was actually what was occurring after about a year of us being together." "We were just feeling each other out, so they were more compact and to the point. "We got together pretty quickly, and so a lot of the songs that ended up on the first release and the second one were first efforts," Keenan told writer Jon Wiederhorn. Though it may have been as much circumstance as pure metamorphosis, Undertow shifted their focus away from conventional heaviness and into proggier territory. "And I think that got us type-cast as a metal band." "We felt like no one would take us seriously unless we recorded only our most aggressive, in-your-face songs and put them out there at one time," Jones told Revolver in 2008. The band had already written much of Undertow at the time they recorded the EP, but they succumbed to their own insecurities and held back their most experimental material. In retrospect, that tentativeness makes sense. There were glimpses of brilliance (the menacing lurch of "Sweat," the noisy climax of "Opiate") - but the songs were more ragged and less ambitious, lacking the heady rhythmic shifts and sharp dynamic contrasts that have become their trademark. The seeds of their droning sound were sewn on their debut EP, 1992's Opiate: Adam Jones' down-tuned riffs, Danny Carey's labyrinthine drumming, Maynard James Keenan's whisper-to-scream range. ![]() But Tool immediately carved out their own niche - one defined by atmosphere and imagery more than shredding. The "progressive metal" movement arose in the late Eighties, led by Dream Theater's symphonic virtuosity and the bombastic theatrics of Queensrÿche. Here, Tool became a genre unto themselves. Tool had only existed for three years when they issued their watershed 1993 debut LP, Undertow, an album that marks a distinct line in the sand - their critical leap from intriguing alt-metal pummel toward a style of prog-metal sorcery we're still dissecting 25 years later. ![]()
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