Tool
Undertow (Zoo)
Dylan Neal, the brain behind Los Angeles-based dark electronic project THIEF, told us about his love for a Tool classic...
Dylan Neal: Picking a favorite album is like picking your favorite child. Or picking your favorite knife. Any decision leaves something you love behind and, if memory serves, such a question was actually an article in the first draft of the Geneva Convention (Geneva Convention (II) for the Condition for Interviews, Aug. 12, 1949, Common Article 6). But I shall rise to the occasion: Tool’s 1993 first full-length album Undertow is an album that has never weathered for me. It was pivotal in showing me what angry music can emotionally achieve. It continues to meet me wherever I am in life, from a young angsty teenager to a man with sudden streaks of wiry white hair.
If you’re only familiar with the more proggy, ten-minute-track Alex Grey Tool (ala “Schism”), this is not that Tool. This is the Tool before any healing had been done. And that’s how I like my music: raw, angry and damp. It sounds like the unconscious, chained in a basement, screaming as if to shake down the walls. Maynard’s acerbic lyrics and belting vocal delivery are unparalleled here while still managing to balance it out with the most incredibly fragile and tender whimpers. Rumor has it that the producer/engineer Sylvia Massy forced Maynard to run laps around the studio to get him as pissed off as possible. She also managed to make it thick and well-rounded while still capturing its rawness and maintaining the music’s crucial dynamics. There is a lot of push-pull that can be lost in the modern production that was starting to become popular around that time.
The subject matter was something that I had never heard addressed before in music. Of course, a lot of it went over my head at the time, but it wasn’t long before I learned what “Prison Sex” and “4°” were about. The title track continues to be my favorite song, and it is one who’s meaning I would later learn about the hard way. Hearing “Sober” for the first time on the radio as a young boy was like that scene in Shawshank Redemption when Andy Dufresne played Mozart over the prison’s loud speakers, giving all of the inmates a brief taste of freedom.
Here’s to 32 more years of being swept away by the Undertow!
THIEF's single "Violent Bloom" is out now. The album Sermons from the Pit is out November 27 on Prophecy Productions.
Photo credit: Milana Burdette
