babydef

In my opinion I like both. Yet I Have to be in a certain mood to listen to one or the other. Tool is more obscure in thier lyrics and APC is more of an anti- Government band. Both of them are Amazing, Maynard knows what he is doing

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"Who are you to judge the life I live? I know I'm not perfect-and I don't live to be. But before you start pointing fingers, make sure your hands are clean."-Bob Marley

Rainard Jalen

I take it that you realize Howerdel is almost certainly the main force behind the sound of APC, actually being a competent musician and a producer and all that... and that Tool's sound is owed largely to instrumentalists Carey, Jones and Chancellor and their talent for polyrhythmic interplay... Like, yeah, I'm really sick of every fan of these bands being f'cking obsessed with showering all the praise on Maynard as if he's some amazing one-of-a-kind one man mission. He isn't. He's not even a particularly good lyricist or vocalist.

cardboard adolescent

I think Maynard's probably the best "metal" lyricist I've ever come across. I've been rediscovering Tool recently, picking up more of the subtleties and layers of meaning. Tool are an excellent band to grow up with, probably the only important band I've grown up with.

Farfisa

Tool is a great band...I just don't like the majority of their fans is all.

cardboard adolescent

That's what everyone always says but all the Tool fans I've met in real life are pretty cool people (there's only three of them, so I can say that honestly). Sure there's a lot of morons who like Tool spamming message boards but you can't take them as being representative of the entire fan base.

Rainard Jalen

A lot of the people you come across at gigs are twonks as well. Tool are the one example I have of a band I once really liked, but was compelled to dislike by the embarrassment of being associated (in any way) with some of those crypto-elitist pseudo-intellectual idiots. Objectively speaking, though, Tool are without question one of the best prog bands to exist post-70s.

lucifer_sam

A lot of people don't recognize how great Tool is. I really like their music, but I also recognize how immeasurably talented the band is. Adam Jones is a great guitarist who sometime gets overlooked for his...erm..."unconventional" style. Danny Carey is a superb drummer, possibly my favorite modern drummer, and has insane mechanical prowess (listen to his tabla solo on Right in Two). And Maynard is...well...Maynard. There's really no other way to describe that man.

I had heard Tool on local radio stations for years and not thought of them twice. Although I was drawn to Tool by 10,000 Days, I worked backwards, eventually making my way to Undertow. I learned to love their strange opuses like Third Eye (which remains my favorite Tool song) and I began to recognize the brilliance in Aenima and Lateralus (which is my favorite album). I saw them twice live, and they were spectacular both times, combining lighting and sound elements to produce an ethereal effect on the senses. I wholeheartedly think they are one of the best modern bands.

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Rainard Jalen

Adam Jones technically speaking is not a great guitarist. But he is good at what he does and fits the bill perfectly for Tool's sound.

lucifer_sam

That's a rather obtuse way of looking at him. It's not just me that thinks hes great; he was in Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (#75) and Guitar World's 100 Greatest Hard Rock Guitarists (#9). But I guess that doesn't mean much to you.

Very well. Technically speaking, he is a fantastic guitarist. It takes a great deal of control to use a slide guitar like he does. He does for Tool what Tom Morello did for Rage. If you play guitar, you should be able to recognize the difficulty of using a slide with as much precision as Jones does.

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Rainard Jalen

Number 75 is pretty much an honorary mention, and as for the Guitar World poll, it mentions quite explicitly that, and I quote:

"This is not a list that ranks who can play the fastest or with the most taste, feeling or technique (although many players on our list have all of those arrows in their quiver) ... It is, rather, a tribute to the great men who **** iron and piss stainless steel razor blades, and do it every time they plug into an amplifier."

If you want to talk actual pure dexterity in terms of speed and amazing technique, Jones is not skillful in that way and I believe he has admitted that too in interviews. This is one of the factors that has actually shaped Tool's sound. If Jones had always been an AMAZING riff player, soloist, and had all sorts of other insane tricks in his repertoire, Tool would have come to sound quite different to how they do. As it happens he's quite an unpretentious player, doing simpler things (compared to many other metal bands) but doing them very well. This is clearly reflected in Tool's music. The guitar parts never whizz off into the land of look-what-I-can-do. The complexities of Tool's music is built more in the interplay between the instruments and how the contrastive rhythms play off each other.

Actually, Jones is the one member of Tool who has been known to mess up in live sets. He didn't get his negative reputation among many guitar junkies for no reason. As I say, he's phenomenally good at what he does, but he simply does not possess the sort of skill that the really great metal guitarists do. Only the most fanatical of Tool fans would seriously try to claim that he has as much skill as the widely revered great players.