Do512 - What to do in Austin

TOOL is a tough band to nail down. While it's fair to say that yes, they are a bunch of hard-rocking freaks, and yes, their frontman, Maynard James Keenan, is one of the hardest-rocking freaks on the scene today, there's clearly more to the band than head-banging and power chords. Their sound is angry and forcefully driven, yet somehow they manage to fuse it with a unique musical ambiance. Unusually long songs, odd segues, twisted lyrics, and very, very weird videos hammer home their unique appeal. 

Tool's greatest breakthrough was to introduce dark, vaguely underground metal to the preening pretentiousness of art rock. Or maybe it was introducing the self-absorbed pretension of art rock to the wearing grind of post-thrash metal -- the order really doesn't matter. Though Metallica wrote their multi-sectioned, layered songs as if they were composers, they kept their musical attack ferociously at street level. Tool didn't. They embraced the artsy, faux-bohemian preoccupations of Jane's Addiction while they simultaneously paid musical homage to the dark, relentlessly bleak visions of grindcore, death metal, and thrash. Even with their post-punk influences, they executed their music with the ponderous, anti-song aesthetic of prog rock, alternating between long, detailed instrumental interludes and tuneless, pseudo-meaningful lyrical rants in their songs.