30 Years Ago, Tool Crafted a Masterful Debut Album with Undertow
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The post 30 Years Ago, Tool Crafted a Masterful Debut Album with Undertow appeared first on Consequence.
Among other trends, the early 1990s saw grunge take over as the dominant rock scene, leaving the hair-metal bands that had commanded the previous decade in the dust.
At the same time, though, the burgeoning subgenre of progressive metal found Queensrÿche, Fates Warning, Shadow Gallery, and Dream Theater offering elaborate concepts and vibrantly intricate instrumentation. Still, there was room for expansion, especially in terms of merging the towering track lengths and erudite ideas of prog with the grimier timbres and subject matter of industrial and alternative metal.
Enter Tool, a ragtag foursome formed in 1990 and comprised of a couple of guys working in the film industry (guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Paul D’Amour) and up-and-coming musicians (vocalist Maynard James Keenan and drummer Danny Carey). Brought together by a series of fortuitous commonalities, they soon signed to Zoo Entertainment; toured with White Zombie and Rage Against the Machine; and injected peculiar ferocity and confrontational viewpoints into 1992’s Opiate EP.
A year later, on April 6th, 1993, they released their full-length debut, Undertow. While not as cerebral, sophisticated, or weird as their subsequent LPs, it clearly displayed the band members’ gifts as songwriters, composers, and players.
Specifically, Tool built upon influences such as King Crimson, Judas Priest, Tom Waits, and Yes amidst striking a finer balance between sophomoric humor and startling examinations of what Keenan once labeled “some real ugly things taken straight from nightmares.” On that note, they tapped into a shared interest in lachrymology, with D’Amour telling Axcess in 1994: “[It’s] like a life philosophy of dealing with yourself and dealing with the pain or whatever bullshit you got inside you.”
Thirty years later, Undertow deserves recognition for kickstarting the career of perhaps the most characteristically provocative, experimental, multifaceted, and enduring metal band of their generation. (Of course, it also stands out for being Tool’s only LP with D’Amour, who left due to creative differences and was replaced by Justin Chancellor for 1996’s Ænima).
Like its predecessor, the album was recorded at California’s Sound City Studios (as well as Grandmaster Studios) with producer Sylvia Massy. Because much of it was written concurrently with Opiate, it came together quickly, and fortunately, the band was able to expand upon the taboo topics and bizarre recording techniques of their initial EP.
For instance, “Sober” was written about a friend of the band who’s “at his artistic best when he’s loaded,” Jones mentioned to Guitar School. He continued: “A lot of people give him shit for that. . . . You can do what you want, but you have to take responsibility for what happens. If you become addicted and a junkie, well, that’s your fault.”
More disturbingly, “Prison Sex” digs into multigenerational patterns of internal and external harm—including molestation and substance dependency—that may arise from childhood sexual violence. Before a live performance of the song back in November 1996, Keenan revealed: “This song is about recognizing [and] identifying the cycle of abuse within yourself. That’s the first step of the process . . . the next step is to work through it.”
The band also employed some truly interesting production methods and gimmicks. For example, experimental closer “Disgustipated” (which initially came up as Track 69 in CD players) incorporates chirping cicadas and the sounds of pianos being destroyed by shotguns and sledgehammers. Prior to that, “Bottom” contains a spoken-word speech from Henry Rollins, whereas “Intolerance” has Jones using “an Epilady shaver and a vibrator against the strings.”
Despite Tool having free rein to do as they pleased with the music itself, they faced considerable pushback elsewhere.
For one thing, Jones’ unusually macabre artwork — featuring a ribcage sculpture, faux necrophilia, a cow licking its genitals, and a pig with the album title shaved into its hide — forced stores such as Kmart and Walmart to boycott the LP. While he stood by his creations (“I like a picture that makes you uncomfortable on one [hand] and it’s beautiful on the other,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1993), he agreed to offer an alternative front cover that showed a huge barcode across a white background.
Plus, the disturbingly abstract yet suggestive stop-motion music videos for “Sober” and (especially) “Prison Sex” — created by Jones and director Fred Stuhr, to the chagrin of Zoo Entertainment — were quite controversial. In fact, the latter was eventually banned by MTV, which — paradoxically enough — helped generate attention for Undertow. (That both clips were shown on Beavis and Butt-Head surely helped, too.)
Luckily, none of those transgressions prevented the album from being extremely popular. Aside from earning praise from several media outlets, it was certified gold by the RIAA in 1993 (and certified platinum in 1995). Around the same time, the “Sober” music video won the Billboard Award for “Best Video By a New Artist,” and the music video for “Prison Sex” was nominated for “Best Special Effects” at the 1994 MTV Music Video Awards.
Although the band certainly appreciated those accolades, Jones confessed to Guitar School that fame and fortune weren’t Tool’s main goals: “What’s important to us . . . [is] making real music for people who appreciate it – it’s not writing a hit song so we can sell as many albums as we can [to] look like big rock stars.”
In hindsight, Undertow’s reactionary authenticity and stylistic daringness still impresses, as it set itself apart from contemporaries while also foreshadowing Tool’s subsequent work.
Unsurprisingly, “Sober” and “Prison Sex” remain two of the band’s greatest tracks, as both exemplify raw approaches to some of the band’s most representative trademarks (hypnotic percussion, malevolent bass lines, soaringly sharp guitarwork, blunt yet poetic lyricism, spacey transitions, and delicate yet pugnacious vocals).
It’s no wonder why we included both tunes in our 2022 list of Tool’s 10 Best Songs.
The rest of the sequence holds up quite well, too. In particular, the psychedelic effects, syncopated off-beats, aggressive verses, and palm-muted riffs of opener “Intolerance” allude to where the band would go in the 2000s. Afterward, the balance of calm narration and explosive verses on “Bottom” predicts a comparable juxtaposition on “Rosetta Stoned” and “Eulogy,” just as the antagonism of “Swamp Song” points to “Ticks & Leeches.”
Tool’s 10 Best Songs
Even the colorful sitar strums of “4°” overtly paved the way for similarly eclectic instrumentation of “Fear Inoculum” and “Lipan Conjuring.” Then there’s the nearly sixteen-minute “Disgustipated,” whose prolonged, avant-garde nature set the stage for material on every record that followed (“Useful Idiot,” “Faaip De Oiad,” “Die Eier von Satan,” “Legion Inoculant,” “Lost Keys (Blame Hofmann),” etc.) However rough and basic these pieces are, they clearly laid the foundation for the quartet’s future endeavors.
“I’d rather have a small group really respect us for what we’re doing and really get it than a bunch of people only scratch the surface and not get it,” Jones said in the aforementioned Axcess interview. Little did he know that Tool would become one of the most revered, ambitious, and inspiring acts in modern metal, with a wholly distinctive chemistry that’s as academically enigmatic as it is mesmerizingly adventurous.
In numerous ways, that one-of-a-kind legacy began with Undertow.
Undertow Artwork:
30 Years Ago, Tool Crafted a Masterful Debut Album with Undertow
Jordan Blum
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