TOOL - Lateralus 25th Anniversary Analysis and Review
I'm a few months late, but I have a good excuse, promise. You'll find out in very soon! Let's discuss this album now. Maybe it was destined to be, but TOOL became one of my favorite bands growing up and remain to this day one of my all-time favorite artists. Their music actually called out to me unlike any other music some 20-something years ago. Allow me to explain.
Upon hearing their title track’s soft, opening guitar melody for the first time in my early teenage years, a meditative, almost religious-like refrain, at an undetermined time and place, the knowledge of who it was was lost to me, because as soon as it had come, it was gone, and I didn’t have the clarity to find out who I had heard. But the melody of Lateralus continued to whisper to me in many quiet moments for several years after, without me knowing who or what was replaying in my head. It felt like a lullaby or a comforting mantra that gave me this sense of peace that cut through all of the noise and the pain and the inner struggles I had growing up.
It wasn’t until several years later on a fateful day a short time after moving with my family to Connecticut that I heard the sound again, playing on a neighbors computer. “What is that song?!”, I could hear myself thinking. My eyes fixed upon the computer screen and on the dark, ambiguous album cover (the original one before streaming) and the title underneath it: Tool - Lateralus. At that moment, I had one of my great musical awakenings.