Even though I know perfectly well that Tool purists will deny the assertion that Tool ever recorded a filler. I've also excluded any covers or tracks I felt qualified as a filler, as opposed to a transition or an intro (those I kept). To keep the process pure, I've purposefully remained ignorant to their presence on the internet in order to maintain a degree of solipsism. I'm revisiting their catalog, not providing a roadmap to understand it. I undertook this ranking in an effort to rediscover Tool, a band I mostly stopped listening to after 10,000 Days was released in 2006. They're probably the most unpopular-yet-worshipped band on the planet. Even their website seems like a puzzle - as does their creative process, as they seemingly finish albums the way Kubrick released films in his later life (i.e. rarely, if ever). Their last album was released more than a decade ago, which partially explains why so many were confused when they got top billing at this year's Governors Ball festival. They are fundamentalists in their disdain for the modern music industry. Tool is hermetically sealed off from the digital age, as none of their music is available on streaming services or iTunes. They don't make it easy on us to become initiated. To appreciate Tool, one requires a culturally forgotten sense of conviction that's both cerebral and militaristic, like learning a martial art, or solving the bishop puzzle in The 7th Guest they even use odd time signatures that confuse the Western music mind. They condition us to be skeptical of group-think and its tools of subjugation (namely, the church and Hollywood) as singer Maynard James Keenan screams into our clogged ears to “learn to swim,” or “let go,” like a nihilistic drill sergeant. As you'll hear in their music, Tool make a passionate plea for individualism. Let me begin with an impossibly pretentious assumption: Tool are a philosophy, one grounded in rhetoric informed by a rejection of what philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to as the “joint-stock economy” of society - the herd, trampling over free thought.
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