Maybe three or four songs into Tool’s show at the AO Arena on Monday night, Maynard James Keenan chooses to goad the crowd. Pointing to the front sections of the floor seating, he says: “is everybody down here over the age of 58? Because if this grandpa can do it, so can you.”
The audience duly get to their feet. It was a stark reminder that Keenan, who performs shirtless and, with his flamboyant Mohican, remains in the trim shape he always has been in in his late 50s; he appeared trapped in amber, as if no time has passed since the titans of alternative metal were last in Manchester, when in fact, it’s been almost 15 years.
But then, Tool are a band defined by their contradictions; hugely revered yet frustratingly non-prolific, both hugely cerebral in their technical proficiency - they have based the tempo of songs around the Fibonacci sequence before - and liable to give songs titles like ‘Hooker with a P***s’ and ‘Chocolate Chip Dip’, and, tonight, peculiarly forgoing a standing floor; there were to be no mosh pits for one of the biggest rock bands in the world.
But what they did deliver on was intelligent, intricate heavy metal played at utterly punishing volume. The air of enigma that has always surrounded Keenan is something accentuated by his apparent misunderstanding of the concept of the frontman, as he instead spends much of the show in the shadows atop either of the giant speaker stacks either side of drummer Danny Carey.
It means Carey himself is effectively front and centre, and perhaps deservedly so as he puts on a often-breathtaking display of technical brilliance, particularly on the slew of fresh material from 2019’s Fear Innoculum. They open with the sprawling title track, a song of two halves, melodic in its first five minutes and defined by Adam Jones’ searing riffery.
Elsewhere, the similarly epic ‘Descending’ is the pick of the new tracks, conjuring up genuine, brooding atmosphere in what is a soulless venue. After such a long time away, fans may feel entitled to be slightly aggrieved at the relative dearth of older material, but there’s room for the opening hat-trick from 2001’s Lateralus, with ‘The Grudge’ providing Keenan’s standout vocal turn of the night, before the haunting interlude of ‘Eon Blue Apocalypse’ segues into a thumpingly heavy ‘The Patient’.
Tool’s relationship to the modern music industry remains an arm’s-length one, but, other than the long stretches of radio silence, this is something to be grateful for; by the time they close out a three-track encore with a soaring take on ‘Invincible’, the need for Keenan to gee up the crowd has long since passed; the whole arena is on their feet in appreciation of this one-off of a band.
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