Keenan has always been a probing lyricist, as well as one of the most compelling voices in rock.
Therefore, it is fair to question whether an album as thoughtful as Mer de Noms will gain the hearing it deserves in the current cultural environment.įor A Perfect Circle are nothing if not thoughtful. Instead, we find ourselves amid a testosterone-drenched frat party, with gangsta-rapping jocks raping women in the mud as fires rage and pay-per-view cameras record it all. The overall atmosphere of the "rock scene" is no longer one of desperate huddling-together. On incantatory songs like "Magdalena" and opening cut "The Hollow," his muezzin-like wails rise above the pulsing rhythms, mingling with Howerdel’s spiraling guitar leads to create a storm reminiscent of Led Zeppelin’s Middle Eastern-influenced material. He never resorts to the screeching or barking of so many other hard-rock singers. A thick, often anguished roar, Keenan’s voice can raise goosebumps on the skin. The immediate impact of Keenan’s voice cannot be discounted it was the thing which immediately catapulted Tool beyond their contemporaries and earned them a cult which persists to this day, five years after their last album and tour. The music seemed to serve as a purgative for the bandmembers, and the crowds often seemed to be pummeling one another in moshpits because, as Warren Zevon sang, they’d "rather feel bad than not feel anything at all." Mid-90s American music – the music of Tool, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, the Rollins Band, and to a lesser extent Nirvana and Pearl Jam – was bleak and despairing. Tool were one of the preeminent bands of the mid-1990s, a period when pop music went through probably its most depressive phase ever.
Such a small jewel is the debut album from A Perfect Circle.Ī Perfect Circle have risen to quick notoriety because the band’s leader, guitarist/producer Billy Howerdel, has partnered himself with Maynard James Keenan, frontman of the long-dormant (but not defunct) Tool. Though it often seems to move forward on fumes and inertia, it periodically shakes itself awake and offers something genuine and vital, a small jewel extruded from a largely undifferentiated mass of slag. This is not to say that "rock" is a dead form, by any means. The advent of digital sampling technology and turntable manipulation, both of which slunk in through the back door of white hip-hop fandom, have not reworked the fundamental "rock" structure in any significant manner rather, like a Latin rhythm or a horn section or a gospel choir, they have become mere affectations, a new collar on an old dog. At this point, approximately fifty years into its existence, it can be fairly expected that "rock" is not going to cough up a new paradigm anytime soon.
0 kommentar(er)
