thedaver39 Wrote:Spycouple Wrote:The Darkest Canuck Wrote:song of the year was Vicarious by Tool IMO, soooooooooooo sooooooooo good.
I liked it better the first time around, when they called it "Schism"
I know you said you dig Tool and you though The Pot would have been a better first single, but do you really think that Vicarious and Schism sound the same?
Yes I do, mostly because of the intro of "Vicarious" sounding like a reworking of "Schism"s baseline. Sure "Vicarious" is sped up in tempo, and the song goes off in different directions (though nothing new sounding in terms of Tool), it comes back to that same familar riff that does a similar build up, just more aggressively and with lots of double-kick. My problem with the song and it sounding (to me) like another "Schism" is only that it was the lead-off single, i.e. the one that was played constantlly on the radio when the album came out.
My initial reaction to both the song and the album was "It sounds like they collected all the multitracks of their previous albums, dumpted them all into ProTools, and said 'Okay, we've got to make a new album somehow out of all these tracks', then went about cutting, pasting, and manipulating until they had something that sounded
kinda like parts of the other albums, but not quite. I actually wouldn't have a problem at all if they did someting like this. They're obviously studio wizards and who knows what kind of alchemy they could pull off that way. It would be an interesting experiment (and might take less than their standard 4 years!
).
But regardless, hearing "Vicarious" on the radio didn't have nearly the same effect for me as hearing "Schism" and going 'Wow, only Tool could actually pull off getting airplay for a 7 minute single in 2001." So what do they do on the next album, five years later? Another 7 minute single that sounds just like you'd expect Tool to sound and even has a similar intro riff to their last radio single. Granted, "The Pot" is a good 6 minutes long, but the opening vocal by Maynard is just dfferent enough to go 'Hmmm...' and then it's followed by much better musical and lyrical hooks than in "Vicarious".
10,000 Days is not an album that I've actually listened to that much personally, but I would probably rank it up there for
best of 2006, if only because of the album cover (genius! and yes we're still on topic). I just can only handle limited doses of Tool at a time, unless driving long long distances. I usually go for Aenima when that dose of Tool is needed, nothing against "Vicarious".
