Rainard Jalen

Do you really consider 10,000 Days an epically great album? Why is it that fans find it so hard to come to terms with songs like Intension and Right In Two being filler tracks? Rosetta Stoned is, in reality, just a very long filler track made by combining a bunch of mindless jams. It couldn't have taken but a couple of sessions to construct. Maynard's long tribute to his mother seems totally out of place and plays more like an excruciatingly long mishmashed collage of ideas than a well thought-out coherent masterpiece. What it boils down to is that in all those years between Lateralus and 10,000 Days, Tool came up with a mere THREE particularly memorable tracks, and they are Track 1, Track 2 and Track 5 (named previously).

The problem with this band is that they've created a fanbase that hold certain deeply entrenched, set expectations of them. Thus, in order to abide by the fans' and their label's expectations, they're given very little room to manoeuvre, explore their own musical interests, and innovate. Keenan, as a prime example, has been reported as being quite interested in Indie music over the past however many years. In interviews he has also been reported to have stated feeling slightly uneasy about having bands even darker than Tool (e.g. Mastodon) starting for them and said he would have personally preferred a band like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

If a fan cannot spot that 10,000 Days explores very little (if any) new ground and is more of an attempt to please and satiate already established Tool lovers more than anything else, then I'm amused. Ask yourselves this: if 10,000 Days had come out back in 2001 instead of Lateralus, what would the reactions have been then?

This band have, I anticipate, absolutely nothing left within the current set framework they appear to work within. They can force something, sure - and I dare say that much of 10,000 Days feels forced - but if they won't be braver than that and actually do something creative the next time out, then there really might as well not be a next time.