Eleven years is an eternity in music, and that’s how long it’s been since Tool released their last album, “10,000 Days.”
Yet the Los Angeles foursome easily sold out St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center Friday night with more than 15,000 fans on hand for two hours of some of the darkest, most brutal and intense songs ever drawn from records that sold in the millions. But despite a set list heavy on material from 2001 and earlier, it doesn’t feel quite right to call Tool a nostalgia act.
That’s because it’s tough to pin down Tool and call them anything. They’ve been compared over the years to King Crimson, Pink Floyd, Rush, Metallica and even Nine Inch Nails. You can hear bits and pieces of those bands in Tool’s mighty noise, but Tool doesn’t really sound like any of them. Really, the only other bands that sound like Tool are the ones ripping them off.
Tool also doesn’t really write choruses. There isn’t some big sing-along that even nonfans know. The band’s music is not on streaming services and, by and large, Tool hasn’t indulged in the deluxe reissue/repackage racket that’s become standard practice for most legacy acts.
In concert, the group also follows their own playbook. Friday’s concert opened with the murky, but potent, 10-minute track “The Grudge.” Rotating spotlights illuminated guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Justin Chancellor as they stood up front, on either side of the stage, as well as drummer Danny Carey, who was perched on an elevated platform at the rear.
As for lead singer Maynard James Keenan, he spent the concert where he always does — prowling around in the darkness. Keenan has long preferred to hang back in the shadows near Carey, but Friday night he was virtually invisible to much of the crowd. His vocals, too, lingered low in the mix, with the grinding, precise riffs remaining front and center.
Fans entered the show to multiple warnings that photos were not allowed, but really, it’s difficult to accurately capture what a Tool concert looks like with a single image. Beyond the spotlights and banks of lasers that dart above the heads of the crowd, Tool’s stage is dark and bare, with a series of custom animation and visuals projected on the massive screen behind the band.
The band extended “Schism” and “Opiate” into crushing monoliths that held the crowd in shock and awe. Really, though, the audience was one of the most attentive, engaged in recent memory. Tool fans don’t really bang their heads, as such, or even move around that much. For the most part Friday, they kept a laser-focus on the sound and spectacle coming from the stage, cheering wildly only at the appropriate times. (Although maybe they were just trying to figure out where Keenan was standing.)
Band members have been writing new songs in recent years, although a drawn-out lawsuit with their insurance company apparently has slowed down the progress. Tool did play one new track, “Descending,” that’s been showing up in their live sets since 2015, giving hope that sometime soon Tool will get around to making another record.
