Reinventing heavy metal: Tom Morello’s favourite Tool album
Any heavy metal fan is likely to have Tom Morello somewhere on their hero vision board – the founder of Rage Against the Machine not only just plays his guitar as an instrument but uses it as an experimental vehicle to reach new sonic realms and redefine whatever you thought rock music was in the first place. But as we all know by now, pioneers such as this are not just a bolt out of the blue. Like any rock worshipper, Morello studied a long line of guitar gods to eventually gain his place among them, displayed in his supersonic picks of favourite albums.
Citing practically every classic record you could name from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath by Black Sabbath to Appetite for Destruction by Guns N’ Roses, Morello clearly has the top of the metal songbook down to a fine art. But one particular album by a special band stands out between the rest for good reasons – not just because it influenced the guitarist, but because they were rising in the same stratosphere with the beginning of Rage Against the Machine.
That, of course, could be none other than Tool and their debut album Undertow, seminal not only for bursting the band onto the scene with a bang but the lasting impact it had on burgeoning rockstar Morello. Released in 1993, and although harbouring all the typical rage of a classic metal record, Tool had the disarming ability to cut through the noise and truly speak to the listener in profound ways that had little been seen before in the genre. Evidently, it was enough to set Morello’s sonic imagination spinning.
Undertow, which spurned the singles ‘Sober’ and ‘Prison Sex’, took all the hallmarks of metal but set them through a different lens, commenting on everything from the nature of artistic expression to the recognition of cyclical abuse, making it an album with markedly more substance than just screech and scream. All in all, this put metal music back in gear and opened it to fresh beginnings.
In a scene at this point in the early 1990s so dominated by the grunge revolution of the likes of Nirvana and Pearl Jam, Tool are roundly credited for breathing life into a heavy metal resurgence wave of epic, electric proportions – from which they and many other bands have continued to ride on ever since. Rage Against the Machine are just one of those such examples, swirling in the same orbit as Tool to then go on to seismic success over the rest of the decade, bringing metal to the masses.
For Morello’s own part, the lyrical complexity coupled with the technical musicality of Undertow couldn’t have been lost. Indeed, in his own capacity, he has never been afraid to delve into something new – from Rage to Audioslave to Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, he has been down just about every avenue music has to offer and is still undoubtedly searching for more.
All of this just goes to show the power of ingenuity. Tool reinventing the nature of heavy metal has allowed heavyweights like Morello to develop a defining stance in the industry, from the thrashing headbangers to guitar rock. Metal music came back into business, and then it changed the world.
