“The turning point”: The moment Tool became the most complex band in the world
Anyone with a passion for complex time signatures will be aware that Tool have always been the masters of somehow squeezing in convoluted methods of counting into their music. Want an example? Their song ‘7empest’ flits between 5/4 and 11/8 time as though that’s a completely normal thing to do. Another example is their track ‘Schism’, which they’ve described as being in 6½/8. You might think this is just a silly way of describing 13/8, but in actual fact, it’s the mean average of all the different time signatures in the song, which change a total of 47 times.
Is your head now throbbing with all of this information? Don’t worry; there are actually plenty of examples of songs where the utilisation of unconventional time signatures doesn’t feel at all contrived, and where metric modulation isn’t just shoehorned in in the most self-congratulatory way possible. Progressive rock acts like King Crimson and Yes are known for having made great use of unusual time signatures, but rarely are they ever as laboured as those used by Tool.
All music hinges on the use of mathematics, and while that allows us to place some sense of rationality to the different time signatures that we use, whether that’s a straightforward 4/4 or an unwieldy 17/16, but when artists begin to throw in more complicated theorems and concepts, that’s when things start to feel unnecessary. You just know there’s some motherfucker out there who has tried to compose a ‘circular’ piece of music in π/4 and tried to justify it in the most chin-scratchingly obtuse manner.
Regardless, Tool liked to wear their penchant for changing time signatures like a badge of honour, and while it might seem pretentious, it is undeniably clever. In fact, there was one moment in their career that bassist Justin Chancellor claims rescued their third studio album, Lateralus, due to how its mathematically complex structure boosted their passion for writing together during a turbulent period.
The album’s title track goes from one bar of 9/8, then to a bar of 8/8, followed by a bar of 7/8 before repeating itself. Chancellor stated in an interview with Revolver Magazine that he “saw it as something that kept getting shorter and shorter and, like a spiral, it kind of folds in on itself,” and that he initially wanted to name to song ‘987’. However, things became even more revelatory when the song began to develop even further with Maynard James Keenan‘s lyrics.
“Maynard had no idea what I was thinking when he went to track the vocals,” Chancellor continued. “But as the song’s folding and changing, he’s singing about the idea of a spiral and how you’re basically trying to achieve something that’s never been achieved and you have to keep reaching for something that you don’t understand. I thought that was an incredible synchronicity.”
The duo may well have been on the same wavelength without realising, but a friend of Chancellor’s would later blow his mind by informing him that the number 987 appears within the Fibonacci sequence, which is the mathematical equation for a spiral. “I’m not the most spiritual person,” Chancellor conceded, “but all that stuff was almost like a reward for all our efforts, and I felt like it got us back on track.” Sure, Justin – now give yourself a round of applause.
