‘Undertow’: The 69-song Tool album where hardly anything happens
Tool was never a band content with taking the easy road on their albums. As much as they liked the idea of making progressive music, no one would see them playing the media game or trying their best to make sponsorship deals with big-name companies throughout their career. What they were doing had to test their audience a little bit, and they ended up making the most out of absolutely nothing when working on Undertow.
When looking at the songs the prog-metal icons are known for, though, Undertow is a far more vicious beast than most people anticipated. Lateralus and 10,000 Days were about opening people’s eyes to different types of spirituality and philosophy, but on this record, it’s more about the band trying to make the heaviest record they could when they were still young and hungry enough to pull it off.
And it’s not like they didn’t deliver on that front, either. ‘Sober’ and ‘Intolerance’ are still some of the best songs that the band would ever write, and while it would be a tall order for anyone to sound threatening next to Henry Rollins, hearing the Black Flag frontman and Maynard James Keenan trade vocal lines back and forth on ‘Bottom’ is one of the high points of the group’s early years.
For the most part, the whole album works together as an air-tight ten-song metal album, but ‘Disgustipated’ isn’t really where the album ends. Since this was at the height of the CD era, Tool decided to have some fun by cramming their album with a bunch of dead tracks after the final song wrapped, meaning that the track number would keep jumping for a little while before getting a hidden track.
Despite being known as the band that was all about heady topics and making songs that tried to open up someone’s third eye, the fact that they had the self-awareness to end the track counter at track 69 is one of the more juvenile jokes any mainstream band has ever made. And once everything gets quiet, all we get is the subtle sound of crickets chirping before an answering machine starts playing.
This message is a caddy voicemail that Keenan got from his landlord when he was working in the studio, which only carries on for a few minutes before dropping out. Since the entire previous track involved Keenan putting on a faux-Baptist preacher accent, though, this was probably yet another attempt at them trying to bring some humour into their music.
That said, Tool wasn’t done making songs that were a little bit funny as well. While the next album did still have some intense topics on it, like ‘Forty-Six and Two’, hearing a track like ‘Third Eye’ start off with a comedy sketch from Bill Hicks and ‘A Message to Harry Manback’ featuring an answering machine message from one of Keenan’s friends proved that they still had their tongues firmly planted in their cheeks.
While it’s hard to endorse an album that spends an excessive amount of its strings doing absolutely nothing, it’s at least charming to see the group have a sense of humour. Because when looking at where they went in a few short years, they seemed more content with working on something much bigger than traditional metal.
