Album Rating: 4.0

The guitar tone just sounds very Lateralus/10K days to me.

Album Rating: 5.0

"Cat in a blender" That s a decent sound texture experiment right there...

Agreed Nightbring

Album Rating: 4.0 | Sound Off

Guitar tone is fine



I prefer the heavier tone of 10,000 Days though

Album Rating: 4.0

I mean, I'm probably not the best person to comment on guitar tones lol. I'm way more attentive to the rhythm section when I listen to most things.

Album Rating: 4.0

"How many times have you listened to it Kalk?"

Idk maybe 3 or 4 times at this point. I'm also listening to other albums from this year as well, but it looks like this one need one or two days of intense listening lol

Album Rating: 1.0

It'd also help if the guitars were actually doing anything interesting, or Maynard's vox weren't so neutered. The drums are the clear highlight here.

^word

Guitar tone is ugly. Like beginners' practice amps ugly.

Album Rating: 2.5 | Sound Off

The drums are 90% sounding like the drums on the past couple of albums though - the rhythm section work here is as derivative of their back catalogue as the rest :/

Album Rating: 4.0

I've still only listened to the whole thing from start to finish once lol. But I've been jamming individual tracks a lot. Just hard to find 1.5 hours free.

Album Rating: 5.0

Drums the highlight agreed.

Come to enjoy Maynard's vocals here.

Guitars are soft bit with fun sections.

Album Rating: 2.5 | Sound Off

Actually the rhythm section is frequently the herald of boredom because the rhythmic intros to a lot of these toons say ‘hey, I’m going to sound like Eulogy’ or ‘do you remember Schism?’ etc

Album Rating: 4.0

Yeah, Doof you'll get no argument against that from me (re drums being nothing new). This album adds basically nothing to their sonic pallette. And that's a disappointment. I guess I see it as them taking the deck of their latter career sounds, shuffling it, and seeing what new songs they can compose from it. I like what they've composed, but it's definitely sad not to have some new cards put in their deck.

Album Rating: 2.5 | Sound Off

The slow ethnic-y tribal-ish rhythmic intros have become a bit of a crutch and none are ever as good as the one that opens Eulogy - just predictable now.



I’d prob respect the band more if they cut these long semi-prog intros and had a few tunes just go wallop from the off, or something else...anything else

Yeah, you know, I'm probably rating this album as high as I do just because I'm a sucker for the 'Tool sound'

Album Rating: 2.5 | Sound Off

A few tunes in the by numbers slow build ‘Tool sound’ ok - a whole album of that barring some choc chip is too much.



The guitar work here isn’t mind blowing but often the guitar tone or solo is all that really breaks the routine between tracks

Album Rating: 4.0

Mockingbeat is a monstrosity (in other news). 1/5.

Album Rating: 5.0

Your rating is about perfect Thal...it was me that made the full Tool trip this year and realised there s no band like Tool and this album wroked for me as the climax of it, as a whole. The album adds nothing to Tool's sound, yet there's no album like this one. It puts everything into retrospective, almost in a dream regression, and I'm pretty sure that was intentional here. I get ppl in general, Aenima fans (meaning, fans who can't see Lateralus above it) and tourists don t like it, but don't let those leave you thinking you are rating too high, specially f.e. comparing wih loads of other year's releases.

Album Rating: 4.0 | Sound Off

If I can slight the album, it's that Maynard is clearly a bit lazy/bored and could've stepped up the intensity a bit better in spots, and that the band relies heavily on repetition to pad out the songs. They could've easily trimmed a couple minutes off most of the tracks and had a stronger album overall, and Adam still pulls too often from that same bag of basic tricks he's always used. Sometimes it's fine because he switched up enough to be interesting (7empest), and other times it's just "please learn a fucking riff that isn't just like 35 of your others".

Album Rating: 5.0

yap...that's about some of the numerous complaints about the album in this Complaints Book Portal.