#Mockingbeat

[human-antithesis]

Tool - Fear Inoculum (August 30th, 2019) Country: United States Genre: Progressive Metal

Lineup: Maynard James Keenan - Vocals Adam Jones - Guitars Justin Chancellor - Bass Daniel Carey - Drums, Synthesizer

Tracklist:

Fear Inoculum - 10:20

Pneuma - 11:53

Litanie contre la Peur - 02:14

Invincible - 12:44

Legion Inoculant - 03:10

Descending - 13:37

Culling Voices - 10:05

Chocolate Chip Trip - 04:48

7empest - 15:43

Mockingbeat - 02:05

[rainingmusic]

TOOL - Mockingbeat 

[soundchxck]

TOOL has shared the track list for Fear Inoculum! Check it out below:

TRACKLIST

01 “Fear Inoculum”

02 “Pneuma”

03 “Invincible”

04 “Descending”

05 “Culling Voices”

06 “Chocolate Chip Trip”

07 “7empest”

08 “Litanie contre la Peur” *

09 “Legion Inoculant” *

10 “Mockingbeat” *

* Bonus tracks

[dreamcatch22]

I’ve been waiting for this day ever since I was a sophomore in high school.

[megacosms]

Tool | Mockingbeat

[teratomat]

GETTING TO KNOW MEME

tagged by @omarandjohnny thank you!

Rules: tag nine people you want to get to know better.

favorite color: black for clothes, the fresh green of plants in the spring more generally like

currently reading: crooked kingdom

last song: tool’s mockingbeat (really into this album rn, also tool’s music is perfect to drown out drunks’ noises from the street. isn’t summer fun?)

last movie: new mortal kombat movie i think?

last series: rick & morty

sweet, savory or spicy: savory and sweet, alternating. i don’t care for spicy food (yeah i’m white, whatever)

craving: not having to go to work, but here we are

tea & coffee: only tea, flavored black tea usually

currently working on: cleaning up my flat, hopefully without losing my mind (WHY is there so much dust, WHERE does it COME FROM)

gonna bother some mutals i think: @ambywerewolf @avgustea @bonewhiteglory @likeasinkingstarbeyond @mrchicsaraleo @negrowhat @pinehutch @seadaemons @theasianseoul sorry! :D

[happymetalgirl]

Tool - Fear Inoculum

I didn’t actually intend to review the long-awaited fifth Tool album so long after its release, time and life got in the way of things, but I’m kind of glad in a way that I’m talking about it now after all the inevitable and ridiculous hysteria surrounding it has mellowed out, which is (spoiler) kind of a sign of the album’s relative quality next to the band’s other four records in and of itself. And, while now I get to talk about it without the confounding noise of the loud clamoring on about it, I don’t really think my words would have really been too different a month and a half ago than they are now.

Tool are a band, of course, who need no introduction; their cerebral brand of progressive alternative metal has become signature and iconic, and their four albums from 1993 to 2006 that preceded this one have served as an influence, if not a lofty aspiration, for thousands of artists since then. Like any self-respecting Tool fan, I consider Lateralus and Ænima to be roughly neck and neck at the top for my favorite spot in the band’s discography (the joint “Parabol” and “Parabola” together being my personal favorite Tool song). Those two albums show the quick crystallization of the band’s progressive metal psychedelia from their rougher, grungier beginnings earlier in the 1990′s. Though I do hold a lot of respect for how accomplished of a debut statement Undertow was, and how much ground it laid for the two albums to come. And even Opiate served as a strong prequel EP to that album. The band’s fourth album, 10,000 Days, however, took a perplexing turn from the heady, yet still metallic prog hallucinations the band had worked up to, and into more drawn-out, spacey experimentation, which I’d say haven’t really aged into anything and sound about as unnecessarily dilute and jam-band-ish as the day the album released in 2006. The album had its high points like the thundering bass of “Vicarious” and “Jambi” and the alternative metal oddity of “The Pot”, but it’s a largely tiresome and less rewarding listen than its predecessors. And that was the last we heard of Tool for thirteen years.

The tremendous wait for the album of course drummed up a lot of speculation of what it would sound like in relation to their previous works. Would it be a return to the beloved progressive metal of  Ænima and Lateralus? Would it be a culmination of all their sounds in retrospect into one gargantuan crowd-pleaser? Or would it be something totally new for the band. Not to toot my own horn, (and not like I can prove this anyway), but I had this hunch that this album would probably be just a delayed continuation of what the band were doing on 10,000 Days, and, while there is the occasional reinvigoration of their sound with some stylistic callbacks to their middle two records prior, lo and behold, as much as I wish I didn’t, for the most part I guessed right.

Coinciding with the band’s acceptance of the times and the advent of streaming with their release of their catalog onto digital platforms, Fear Inoculum was released as a single-disc CD and as a longer, digital version, with three extra instrumental interludes sprinkled throughout the track listing stretching it past the limits of the CD format to nearly eighty-seven minutes, and it sure feels like the hour-and-a-half-long listen that it is, and not in a flattering way. Like I said, the album is largely a continuation of the atmosphere-focused prog of 10,000 Days, which is only somewhat updated from the band’s 2006 effort. The main songs are all over ten minutes long, and the similarly low energy across the marathon track list doesn’t really make a great case for this direction in contrast to what the band have shown themselves to be great at, namely vibrant, untethered prog adventurousness.

The opening title track layers together plenty of diverse tom percussion and the band’s recognizable guitar reverb into a slowly growing and whirlpool (kind of like the album cover) of Tool’s 10,000 Days sonic pallet that gradually cascades into a thicker, distortion-fuzz-driven finish. The abstract, cryptic lyricism about shedding the influence of manipulative fear mongering is more cryptic than poetic, but I can see the vagueness of the subject being a good way to make it widely and appropriately applicable in its commentary and play into the paranoia of refusing to acknowledge exactly what this deceiver is. As a tension-builder, it’s a great way to start the album off, but it doesn’t really seal the pay-off as the heavy bass line tries to usher in a climax while the other instrumentalists mostly just coast on forward to the end of the song like a tired distance runner giving a bit of a burst to finish the last stretch. And that’s one of the shorter tracks, with over an hour left to go.

The second song, “Pneuma”, is structurally not too dissimilar, with a synthy bridge this time connecting the meditative tom-drum/reverb-guitar build-up to a relatively hum-drum metallic non-finale. It really only marginally feels like it’s that kind of progressively building song, clearly being more focused on its meditative ambiance than its intentional trajectory. In which case, I would have honestly probably preferred the band taking that approach more holistically, rather than trying to fit it into a prog metal formula. Lyrically, the song centers around a lot of transcendentalism that Tool have written about before, not really adding much new beyond perhaps a slightly different angle to meditate on it from. The song is followed by the first of the instrumental interlude tracks, “Litanie contre la peur”, which plays around with a melodically manipulated vocal inflection over some humming ambiance for about two minutes.

The third big piece on the album, “Invincible”, which finally plays a little more to the band’s progressive strengths. The guitar groove is actually allowed to drive the song and shine in a more energetic manner as Danny Carey gets to get a lot more bombastic behind the kit, as do the rest of the band during the instrumental sections throughout the song. It’s not only a more metallically groove-driven song whose heavier elements are actually used to cultivate a sense of meditation from a much more signature angle, but also a more interestingly progressive song that does more than just slowly swell up to a mild crescendo for ten minutes. The worries of the song’s warrior speaker are pretty transparently transposeable to the worry and struggles any aging artist (especially a long-absent artist like... Tool, maybe) to maintain their importance and the meaningfulness of their work.

The ominous bass hum of the second interlude track, “Legion Inoculant”, leads into the fourth of the album’s main epic songs, which keep getting longer and longer with the thirteen-and-a-half-minute environmental apocalypse warning “Descending”, which pleas for an end to the apathy that exacerbates the compounding climate crisis. Musically, the song plays into the somber melancholy of the lyrics, while taking a more balanced approach between the spaciness of the band’s last album and the heavier elements of Ænima in particular, perhaps intended given the similarity of that album’s title track’s subject matter. While some of the later sections feel a bit over-indulgent, this song deserves its length as it cascades through emotive defeatism via progressive metal ebbs and flows into this impending metallic crescendo that actually fits nicely with the melancholic rock build-up and the lyrical implications; it sounds like its tracking the collapse of , much like the title track of Ænima., starting and finishing with the sound of waves upon the shore that will continue to crash, just as they did before our takeover of the land, after our demise.

While the lyrical concept revolving around self-doubt and  of “Culling Voices”, is fascinating and all too tangible, the music falls more on the mild side again, with the band’s softer, more meditative atmosphere crashing just twice into explosive, but unimpressive climaxes of muscular, but not too creative, guitar riffing. The longest of the interludes, the wind-chime-laden and effects-doused electronic pulsing of “Chocolate Chip Trip”, features a tasty little drum solo to kind of make up for the lack of spotlight Carey gets on this album as he does so much of the rhythmic legwork, which I certainly appeciate and welcome.

The closing epic, “7empest” was the song fans were fawning over the most as a monstrous riff-fest after the album was finally released, and the riffing across the song’s almost sixteen minutes, as well as the repeating of the lyrical mantra, do capture some Ænima vibes, which makes sense knowing it was pieced together with motifs written during that era. The song’s lyrics once again call back to that breakthrough album with the repetition of the mantra “A tempest must be just that” in reference to the convenient muddying of the waters of responsibility for disasters caused by said chaos once it arises. It’s a song about those in power managing to use the chaos they create through their mismanagement to hide their guilt and just divert the blame on the chaos itself. The song is proggy in Tool fans’ favorite way and indeed dense with churning effects-laden riffage and a faster, much more aggressive vocal performance from Maynard James Keenan. While it is the longest, heaviest, and most vintage-Tool of the tracks here, I’d say it only stands a bit above the rest of the track list, and honestly maybe not surpassing the magnificent “Descending”.

The digital version wraps up with the odd, but disposable coda of the two-minute chirping sample manipulation of “Mockingbeat”, a strange note to end this version of the album on, but ultimately nothing destructive.

I had talked about Rammstein’s self-titled album and Slipknot’s We Are Not Your Kind as being among the year’s biggest of the biggest metal releases, but the long-awaited arrival of Fear Inoculum tops them both. Yet for all the drama building up around this album, all the hype that was inevitably going to hoist hopes and expectations to astronomical and similarly inevitably unrealistic levels, Fear Inoculum sits average at best, if not rather low in the band’s small catalog, and the rather quick hushing of this hype from fans and the metal sphere in general shows that I’m not alone in my relative underwhelmedness after the thirteen-year wait. While that sounds harsh, it is just because this album had such incredibly high expectations to live up to that it was most likely never going to meet. Fear Inoculum isn’t a terrible album by any means, but it does suffer from being drawn out the most by its weakest elements, its least creative ideas stretching it out in hopes of finding purpose for doing so, but coming back empty-handed. A little while after the album came out, Maynard made some kind of comment about this album being great eight years ago, which suggested that it had been in the works for a long time but perhaps held up by frivolous reasons, but also that it was composed largely near the time of 10,000 Days, as I thought it might have been, and it just kind of bugged me that this album probably didn’t need to be the huge prodigal event it was, maybe just an acceptable transitional moment for Tool to figure out what they wanted to do with their expanding sound arsenal. Instead we got arrested development dressed up as a comeback at a time when we might otherwise have one or two more albums from this band (by their releasing pace), possibly more accomplished. I had mentioned in my review of Opeth’s newest album that they deserved the patience with their prog rock transition, and that album showed it. It took four albums to get a record that could stand tall alongside their progressive death metal classics, but it came, and the journey did come with some good highlights along the way too. The journey to this album was a test of patience with clumsy publicity for several years more than anything else, not quite as rewarding, no music to offer along the way (aside from side projects), and still a sense of a band just picking up where they left off years ago without really assessing their direction. I’m glad Fear Inoculum is finally here, but I think others will share this sentiment with me even if they haven’t said it to themselves out loud. Yes, we got a few strong highlights out of this record, but I’m more relieved that the fiasco surrounding the wait is over than I am excited to have this batch of new songs (the latter of which I wish outweighed the former).

6/10

[vulturehound]

TOOL - Fear Inoculum (Album Review)

(more…)

[black-metallic]

Album Review: Tool - Fear Inoculum

Tool is a progressive metal band from the US that formed in 1990 and have released five studio albums and one EP. One of the most recognizable names in not only progressive metal, but in the 90’s alternative scene as well, Tool was one the first bands to meld strong progressive elements into metal, and especially into alternative-tinged metal. Most of the other progressive metal bands at the time, like Dream Theater, Symphony X, and Fates Warning, had their sound more rooted in 80’s heavy metal or power metal and influenced by the Yes side of prog. Tool, meanwhile, was more influenced by Melvins and the King Crimson side of prog, and hence developed a much grungier and more angular style. This gave Tool a much broader reach than the other nascent progressive metal bands had, as they could tap into the burgeoning alternative scene in addition to the existing progressive metal scene, as well as draw interest from many other music fans. Over the years, they’ve collected three Grammy awards, including two for best metal performance, five top 10 US rock charts placings, and tens of millions of record sales, alongside widespread critical acclaim and fan praise. Their last album, 10,000 Days, was released in 2006, and, in the succeeding 13 years, their next album became one of the most anticipated pieces of media ever among music fans and on the internet. The album, titled Fear Inoculum, was finally released on August 30th, to near universal acclaim.

Tool has never been a band that has had the philosophy of radically changing its sound in between albums. In fact, there’s a very clear thread that runs from Undertow, released in 1993, to 10,000 Days, the main changes over the years being that the band’s sound has become less aggressive and more dynamic and nuanced. Lateralus is widely considered to be the band’s peak, or at the very least the perfection of the band’s style, with 10,000 Days being considered more of a refinement of Lateralus compared to how Lateralus directly built upon 1996’s Aenima and Aenima directly built upon Undertow. This led to 10,000 Days being judged as somewhat derivative and lacking the strong sense of tightness and power that their other albums were judged to have. Fear Inoculum ends up doing both, being a further refinement upon Lateralus’s sound, but also building upon what was done on 10,000 Days, producing an album that is more subtle, but at the same time fresher and more precise. The album often finds the band playing more quietly, or at least more subdued, while also playing as heavily and powerfully as they ever have, and the transitions between the different moods hit hard. Finally, the album shows the band can perform as well as they ever have, with the music being as progressive as anything the band has written or played before.

The eponymous track was released as a single on August 7th, and two other songs on the album, Invincible and Descending, were frequently teased and more or less fleshed out live by the time Fear Inoculum was released. The title track shows Tool’s influence from post-rock structures, with the whole 10-minute song acting as a slow, but always noticeable crescendo. Invincible and Descending are both classic-sounding Tool songs, albeit with a particular sense of emotion and precision. Pneuma and Culling Voices take that sound to the extreme, being two of the most moving and beautiful songs in Tool’s discography, yet simultaneously being just as hard-hitting when they need to be. 7empest goes in the other direction, being the heaviest and most direct song on the album, yet still maintaining a level of sensitivity on par with the rest of the album. Chocolate Chip Trip is a short instrumental that acts as a showcase for Danny Carey’s drumming, led by an otherworldly synth melody. The album is rounded off by three more short instrumentals, Litane contre la peur (French for litany against fear), Legion Inoculant, and Mockingbeat, a set of three ambient tracks that act as interludes, a tradition on Tool albums that goes back to Aenima.

Any review of a Tool album, and especially one of Tool’s latest album, can’t be taken seriously without at least mentioning the band’s widespread meme status on the internet. Rather ironically, it is people who take the band way too seriously (alongside the incredibly long wait time and anticipation for the new album of course) that gave it that status in the first place. And, while the band have sarcastically fed into those reports at times, if anything, they’ve shut them down just as hard over the years. Nevertheless, the band are clearly the product of four incredibly talented musicians and songwriters and deserve all the praise and recognition their music has garnered over the years. It’s no aberration that their albums are looked upon so highly by fans of many different genres, from progressive metal to alternative rock and everything in between. And Fear Inoculum deserves a place right alongside Tool’s first four albums, especially considering the time it took to write, perform, and produce it, a wait that I, and many others, from the most discerning music critic to the most casual fan, feel was worth it. For me, Fear Inoculum is right on par with Lateralus, yet, in a number of ways, is separate from it and deserves its own place. Keenan’s vocals in particular are a high point on the album, representing, at least to me, the pinnacle of his vocal performance, having a sense of subtlety and depth that will be hard to match by him in the future, much less by any other singer. Overall, Fear Inoculum is a fantastic album, one that I thoroughly enjoyed throughout its entire 87-minute runtime, one that I’m sure I’ll appreciate even more the more times I listen to it, and one of the best progressive metal releases, especially from a popular band, in recent years.

Score: 10/10

[somehowwow]

Fear Inoculum (10:20)

Pneuma (11:53)

Litanie contre la Peur (2:14)

Invincible (12:44)

Legion Inoculant (3:10)

Descending (13:38)

Culling Voices (10:05)

Chocolate Chip Trip (4:48)

7empest (15:44)

Mockingbeat (2:06)

[mrtcoool]

Tool - Mockingbeat https://ift.tt/2P9GRMF

[blogjavieralejo]

Progressive Rock

#387 / 8.5/10 / 2019

[ramramnath]

Saved on Spotify "Mockingbeat" by TOOL https://ift.tt/2ZmvJTu

[musicsensedotclub]

.: TOOL – Fear Inoculum – 2019 :. https://musicsense.club/?p=4946 https://musicsense.XyZ/?p=4946 Artist: #TOOL | Album: #Fear_Inoculum | Released: #2019 | Style: #Progressive_Rock | #Progressive_Metal | #Alternative_Metal | F&Q: #MP3_320Kbps | Size: 199 Mb | Price At #Amazon: $9.90 | 📃 Album Bio: Fear Inoculum is the fifth studio album by American rock band Tool. It was released on August 30, 2019, through Tool Dissectional, Volcano Entertainment, and RCA Records. It is the band's first album in thirteen years, due to creative, personal, and legal issues band members encountered since the release of 10,000 Days. The album was released to critical acclaim, with reviewers agreeing that the band had successfully refined their established sound. 🎵 Track-List: 01 – Fear Inoculum 02 – Pneuma 03 – Litanie contre la Peur 04 – Invincible 05 – Legion Inoculant 06 – Descending 07 – Culling Voices 08 – Chocolate Chip Trip 09 – 7empest 10 – Mockingbeat | https://www.instagram.com/p/B2dxOeXlGWk/

[cuteness--overload]

The band Tool just released a new album. The final track is called "Mockingbeat" and uses a Northern Mockingbird's various calls (put through some distortion) as the base of the song. I thought it was cool and wanted to share :)

Source: https://youtu.be/brGNqP1EBLE

[chenardery]

FEAR INOCULUM TITLE TRACKS ON PHYSICAL VS DIGITAL

Physical edition ~

01. Fear Inoculum

02. Pneuma

03. Invincible

04. Descending

05. Culling Voices

06. Chocolate Chip Trip

07. 7empest

Digital edition ~

01. Fear Inoculum

02. Pneuma

03. Litanie Contre La Peur

04. Invincible

05. Legion Inoculant

06. Descending

07. Culling Voices

08. Chocolate Chip Trip

09. 7empest

10. Mockingbeat