Prog-metal maestros elevate arena rock into art

Tool has turned arena rock into an art.

Literally.

The Los Angeles prog-metal band is known not only for its intense, heavy material but for the surreal artwork and videos of guitarist Adam Jones that go along with it.

Throw in some lasers and a brilliant light show and you've got an arena show as epic as the 10 songs the band showcased during their two-hour extravaganza for a delirious crowd of 8,500 fans at the MTS Centre Sunday. It was the band's first visit to the city since a gig at St. Boniface social hall Le Rendez-Vous (R.I.P.) in the mid-1990s.

The quartet -- Jones, vocalist Maynard James Keenan, bassist Justin Chancellor and drummer Danny Carey -- took to the stage after a speech from LSD guru/counterculture icon Timothy Leary and launched into an intense 15-minute version of Third Eye, building from a slow start to an explosive climax. It's a formula they would come back to in songs like Jambi, Vicarious and Schism, working from a steady, tense groove toward a massive emotional finish.

"Good evening, Canada. For the next two hours whatever happens outside these walls has no bearing on what happens inside," Keenan said cryptically during his only address to the crowd.

The frontman -- who was dressed like a postman with a "Postal" T-shirt, shorts, sunglasses and cap -- has one of the most powerful voices in music, but as a frontman he's decidedly low-key.

For the whole show, until the encore, he stood to the right of Carey on a riser and rarely looked at the crowd, focusing his gaze on the drummer or the video screens behind him.

What was going on was worth watching, though.

The stage setup included screens behind and above the band, on both sides of the stage and on the drum riser playing various colour patterns, stop-motion animation, abstract images and the band's videos while other psychedelic patterns were shown on curtains behind the screens.

Four semicircular lighting rigs moved up and down over the stage, bathing the musicians in deep purples, reds, blues and greens while lasers shot into the crowd.

A mandala hanging in the air topped it off.

It was spectacular to see, but Tool's material is strong enough to stand on its own, with or without the eye candy. It's heavy and dark, with numerous changes in dynamics, jarring stops and starts with a low end that reverberates in your chest and inventive riff-work from Jones.

Keenan's voice acts as another instrument and his use of vocal effects adds another trick to his bag.

They don't have a new album to support (their last release was 2006's 10,000 Days) and didn't tease the audience with any new material. They visited all four of their full-length albums, including four songs from their 1996 masterpiece Aenima, but some may have been disappointed by the exclusion of singles Sober and The Pot. Tool isn't a band that relies on singles, though, and fans were more than thrilled to hear favourites such as Forty-Six & 2, Intolerance, The Patient and Aenema.

If you weren't there Sunday night, you will have to rely on witness accounts (or YouTube videos of old shows) to get the visual proof, since the band banned all cameras from the arena and security guards were ordered to stop anyone from taking pictures.

rob.williams@freepress.mb.ca

Concert Review

Tool

July 4, 2010

MTS Centre

Attendance: 8,500

five stars out of five

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 5, 2010 D3