Home Review – Tool – Fear Inoculum

Review – Tool – Fear Inoculum

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Pros

  • Insane execution
  • Beautifully interwoven
  • Musically a pearl... dot

Cons

  • Come on, it's TOOL

Price: € 15

Execution
Recording
Tool Fear Inoculum

We write too few music reviews on Alpha Audio. The reason is very simple: time, capacity… But we can’t skip this one. After thirteen years, the American TOOL suddenly comes up with Fear Inoculum. And damn! What a gem!

An hour and a half of roaring guitars, complex rhythms and atmospheric intro’s and outros. An hour and a half… wow. But… What genre is TOOL? Progressive? No. Metal? No. Rock? No. Well: it’s actually just TOOL. The band that is capable of writing 15 minute songs. Over and over again. It’s the band your editor fell madly in love with after listening to it just once.

Atmosphere

If you skip tracks on a TOOL record, you don’t get it… an album by TOOL is one big trip. And that includes the long intro’s, outro’s and sometimes completely crazy interludes. Although Chocolate Chip Trio is very hard to digest if we’re honest. Anyway, 7empest makes up for everything. What a wonderful track. Just like Descending. Whining, screaming guitars… But in a good way.

In this respect it is completely in line with the older work we are used to from them. Undertow is still a bit rough, but Aenima – still a big favorite of your editor – and Lateralus already feels extremely mature. 10.000 days idem. Rosetta Stoned is the pearl if you ask us.

Fear Inoculum fits perfectly with the rest. In fact, they seem to have grown even more as a band. Which is crazy, since they haven’t played together for more than a decade (we estimate).

Just play

We can now go through all the tracks and tell you how good they are. Eleven tracks; an hour and a half of real music. No autotune shit. No computer-generated pop-songs with lyrics about drugs, booze and bad sex. No. An hour and a half of music. From real musicians… So it’s still possible.

But before we do that, we just advise you to look up this album on the internet (they’re on Vimeo, Youtube, and all streaming services) and play it. You’ll find you can’t stop. Just like us. The album is practically on repeat. In the car, in the office… at home… You get the point.