‘Mantra’: The Tool song that was created by a cat
Any artist will want to make something that’s not exactly conventional when they make a record. The studio is a playground for anyone wanting to explore new sounds, and whether it’s Eddie Van Halen playing with the tone controls on his amplifier or Pink Floyd making avant-garde masterpieces, the true artists of their genre know how to take the basis of a good song and add the right musical spice into the mix. But nowhere in the metal handbook did it say that animals could be brought into the mix, but Tool managed to find a way when making one of their classic albums.
But compared to every other metal band out at the time, Tool never wanted to do anything that had to do with the mainstream. They had their moments where songs would find their way into the public consciousness, but no one is sitting around deciding to write a song called ‘Stinkfist’ and hoping that it can crack into the top 40.
That field was reserved for the typical pop songwriters, but Maynard James Keenan wanted to entertain people in a far different way. And whereas Undertow was pure aggression from cover to cover, Aenema was the first time they started sprinkling some tongue-in-cheek humour into the mix. Outside of adding Bill Hicks to the end of the album, hearing them make an industrial nightmare centred around a cookie recipe or a 1990s equivalent of an Internet troll on ‘A Message to Harry Manback’ is a lot funnier than it has any right to be.
If that was the beginning of the experimentation, though, Lateralus was when Tool wanted to see some of their listeners’ minds melt. While under the influence of major psychedelics, many of the tunes on the album had a cerebral edge to them, whether that’s the mathematics that go into the title track or the time signatures changing on every other beat on the song ‘Schism’.
Outside of the classics on the album, the interludes are a great way to build up atmosphere between the tracks. Some of them are a bit strange, like claiming that aliens are going to be storming out of Area 51, but ‘Mantra’ acts as a nice comedown before going into ‘Schism’. But that otherworldly sound was much more animalistic than most people would have imagined.
Whereas most people would try to make strange sounds with a guitar or tune their bass drum so it sounds just right, the sounds on ‘Mantra’ resulted from Maynard James Keenan bringing his cat into the studio and gently squeezing it. Keenan insisted it was a gentle squeeze, but after pitching it down a lot more, they found that otherworldly sound that doesn’t even feel like it’s made for this Earth.
While that would have been the highlight of any band’s eccentric side, that barely covers what Tool could do on record. Other than making intense music, there’s also the strange interlude at the end of Opiate where Keenan talks about wanting to fuck his La-Z-Boy and almost everything going on in a song like ‘Maynard’s Dick’.
But, really, people need more of this kind of lighthearted humour in rock and roll. Most people fall into the trap of becoming too self-serious whenever they make a record, so having a song that’s all about poking fun at the idea of recording is one of the best ways to make someone stand out amongst their fellow musicians.
