Tool’s Lateralus is a masterpiece, a massive prog-metal epic that shifts and careens through odd time signatures and dynamic song structures over its 78 minute runtime.
The album came out five years after the 1996 Aenima, and just a year after A Perfect Circle released Mer De Noms., a band formed by singer Maynard James Keenan and guitarist Billy Howerdel. (Looking back now, it’s amazing to think we saw two Tool albums and two A Perfect Circle albums released in a seven year window. Releases from these bands have been sporadic ever since, with just one Tool album released in the past 13 years.)
A Perfect Circle sold a million copies of their debut, and had a sizable hit with the song “Judith,” so the with the success of Mer De Noms, I was a bit nervous to see if Tool would veer in a more commercial direction. Thankfully, one listen to the first track from Lateralus, “The Grudge,” shot those concerns right out the window.
Lateralus grabbed me immediately; I listened to it over and over on my Sony Discman. It’s an album that feels both dense and complex, but also free and open, particularly as the songs are free of the standard rock structure of verse-chorus-verse. The songs go wherever the band’s instinct take them.
The title track in particular can be appreciated at a completely surface level – quiet intro, heavy guitar section, a killer vocal and lots of pounding drums, all building up to a powerful ending. “Cool, man. This song really rocks.”
But a few years after the album came out, I became aware of the band’s use of the Fibonacci sequence for the structure of the song. While I’ve read some interesting things that describes how it was incorporated, the video below does the best job in outlining how complex the song structure really is.
I can’t even fathom how the band pulled this off. It’s hard enough to write a song in 4/4 with three (maybe four) chords, let alone a song with three distinct time signatures, a specific number of syllables in the lyrics, and then working out the timing of the song so it matches the Golden Ratio.
Of course, you don’t need to know any of that to just bang your head to the song and belt out lyrics like,
“I’m reaching for the random or
Whatever will bewilder me
Whatever will bewilder me
And following our will and wind
We may just go where no one’s been”
It’s a powerhouse on its own.
But discovering how much thought and planning and heart goes into the art we love makes it that much more extraordinary.
As a bonus, Rick Beato breaks down another Lateralus song called “Parabola.”
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