As a pair of contortionists dangled from the rafters by their ankles, Tool singer Maynard James Keenan was writhing in his own private dungeon at the back of the stage.
Silhouetted against one of three video screens Sunday at the Allstate Arena, the singer chanted minor-key, hymnlike phrases as the swirl of “Parabol”/”Parabola” engulfed him, then begin to articulate his ambivalence: “This body, this body holding me, feeling eternal/All this pain is an illusion.”
It was an ecstatic yet disturbing moment, the music cresting on the waves of Adam Jones’ majestic guitar and the four-limbed drumming of Danny Carey, even as all eyes were glued to the freak show above the crowd as the contortionists wriggled and swung like some crude medieval sacrifice. Meanwhile, the stentorian-voiced singer was busy violating all the rules of hard-rock showmanship by slinking in the shadows instead of commanding stage center.
Tool is hardly a conventional rock band, yet here they were headlining a sold-out arena show on the heels of a million-selling album, “Lateralus,” only the quartet’s third in eight years. The group inspires cultish devotion, not unlike the opening acts on its recent tours: British progressive-rock veterans King Crimson, who opened a handful of West Coast dates last month, and the Swedish grindcore masters Meshuggah, who performed at Allstate. Tool combines elements of both outfits: Crimson’s cerebral foreboding, Meshuggah’s dense, math-rock precision. Add an element of Pink Floydian mystique, and Tool has become one of the more unlikely mainstream metal success stories of the last decade.
Save for a couple of gratuitous Keenan rants about how corporate vampires have taken over the music business, the quartet doesn’t pander to its audience. The weight of the show is put squarely on the back of the sometimes difficult, complex music, and the center does not always hold: “Reflection” couldn’t sustain its 10-plus minutes of dirge-like atmosphere. But mostly, the mazelike passages reward attentive listening. Carey and bassist Justin Chancellor explored rhythm from every angle; Jones was as much a colorist as a soloist, but when he stepped forward to make a statement, he made it count, whether pouncing on the power chords of “Prison Sex” or entering dramatically in “The Patient” and “Schism.”
Yet for all its dexterity and daring, the band refuses to look its audience in the eyes; instead it hides beneath the lurid glow of its fascinatingly disturbing videos. These depict bodies twitching, rows of computer drones morphing into strands of DNA, and mutants twisting in a grotesque ballet–unwitting subjects of a cosmic lab experiment, with Keenan trying to scratch his way out. “I’ll keep digging till I feel something,” he cried on “Stinkfist.” If transcendence was the goal, Tool demands that its audience meet it halfway, crediting listeners with the intelligence to pry open the forbidding exterior of this labyrinthine music, and find the strange beauty within.
