fireplaceporno
11-20-2002, 10:21 AM
In trying to come up with the best possible way to explain Parabol and Parabola to a dear friend of mine, I was literally forced to include the words Spill and Bleed. It seems as though such a dramatized difference in song continuity, which blends together so well without seams, cannot be spelled out clearly to anyone who hasn't heard it. I tried exemplifying my point by saying, "Imagine taking red ink and pouring it onto a normal piece of notebook paper. Turn the paper over and look at what you get. Two totally different works of art with the same basic contour, concept. That's a bleed," and "when you bake a cake and you spill the battered egg into the flour, you get a completely new end product with two ingredients. That's a spill." What I meant by this is that work Tool had obviously labored with in order to suture two completely different emotions into one undulating tune is genious. Parabol, much less an introduction than a prequil, is a harmonious, somber, and almost Gregoric Chant-like track which plays gorgeously from even unequalized stereo systems. It has a sort of depth-perception to it, with a very active bass line and a slow, almost elongated vocal pitch. Parabola spits itself out at you, implanting itself into your ear with a similarity to its sister Parabol, yet a very unique and completely complimentary opposing force (that is an oxymoron if I ever wrote one). It is aggressive, vocalized with intent and obviously a very different state of mind than its prequil, Parabol. The stitch that ties Parabol and Parabola together could never have been woven tighter, with a feedback blast into a dynamic musical explosion of drums, guitar, and bass highly amplified yet not competeing at all with each other. In short, a great epic song which can be considered the best musical pair of tracks ever recorded.