Tool's Ænima: More songs about paranoia and death

Twisted new Tool album clocks in over an hour of tormented dreams and paranoid fantasies.

Tool does not simply "return" to the music world. After three years of silence, like a stasis in a murky swamp, Tool is a hand that reaches through the muck, pulling down the unsuspecting into its dark universe far beneath the surface of the conventional music world.

On this trip into the vortex, Tool offers the most exhaustive journey yet through their world. In a mere 77 minutes, Ænima fleshes out all of Tool's favorite topics, dealing with a cycle of power, technology, paranoia and the death of the human spirit.

Like Undertow, Ænima often sounds like a concept album, partly because the band's very sound is conceptual. The lyrics merely reinforce a drama that the sounds depict, with vocals of somber broodings as the signature guitars lie in wait in the background.

This "down" time offers the gloomy perspective of a man struggling to survive the complexities of the world with his humanity intact. The "main character" deals with various influences that eventually meld into cogs of society, including technology, religion and politics.

"Eulogy" can perhaps be seen as the thesis of the album, fully describing such a struggle. "He had a lot to say," it begins, with quiet despair over a man who has died, then climaxing with signature guitars and the Orwellian rant of "Don't you step out of line."

This big brother system in place throughout the album, with eerie sounds of electric waves in "Ions" and rhythms of "Die Eier Von Satan," which sounds like a hydraulic press. The song diverges briefly from the usual Tool sound, showing experimentation in an apparent homage to Einstürzende Neubauten, a German prototype to similarly revolutionary music.

The music eventually returns to the individual, who fights this dystopia through anger, drug use, apathy and submission. Climaxes come one after the other, an effect which may grate on those with weak stomachs as they await the end of an assault that never seems to stop.

But by the time "Ænima" is reached, every outlet of fighting has been exhausted, leaving the individual only with apathy. "The only way to listen is to brush it all away," he says with a cry that seems to come from an abandoned corner.

The final cry comes in "Third Eye." But it is not an appeal to the hopeful, but rather a last gasp. The only hope remaining is that Tool's world is a fiction, a world where all that remains of the individual is a frightened echo as the wheel of society rolls us asunder.