Latralus The Album In General

[Zerocool997]

OK does anyone else feel this whole album is about being in a breakup or divorce? When I first heard the album I felt that way since I just came out of a long term relationship but now it's not as apparent. Well does anyone else feel this way?

[ATO]

I've always seen Lateralus as an examination of a decaying relationship.

The Grudge is the beginning. Its where the breakup starts, due to some event occuring and the people involved being unable to forgive.

The Patient is the slow, crawling period in which the relationship staggers along. Both parties know it is crumbling, but they are still trying to save it.

Schism is the actual breakup. One of the parties involved is lamenting how he knows that the relationship once worked, and is trying to figure out why it still doesn't.

Parabol/Parabola is either the reforming of the relationship or the start of a new relationship or even possibly a birth. It is one of the more difficult parts of the album to understand.

Ticks and Leeches just flat out doesn't fit. It is definitely about a relationship, but I really don't see it fitting the theme of the album very well. Just seems like a hard angry song to appease the fans.

Lateralus is all about self discovery. It is about examining and reexamining every situation in your life. Through doing so you can find the real meaning to life, eventually discovering the underlying threads that bind us all.

Which leads us to Dis/Ref/Triad which are all about losing your ego and your self in order to become one with the new underlying society discovered in Lateralus.

And of course Faaip which is just typical tool oddity faire.

Sure this is a gross simplification of Lateralus, but I'm not going to write a fucking book so back off.

[asphexict]

i've never really thought about the album being an underlying aspect of a relationship with someone or some people. rather relation in general to what is taken in and filtered out through their thoughts.though their is a lot that can be related to personal relationships. the album as well as any tool has always been quite humbling to me at the same time i drift off into space of thought. reminds me a lot of pink floyd's the wall. like tales of their own experiences that have and can make us build our walls or pine away adrift as though to set a coarse for the heart of a blackhole. though a blackhole is thought to be a very stronge point in the universe where life as we see is diminished in our basic terms, inverted and brought to light in a way that we hardly recognize. this album as with the others serves to us all as a parabol to life taken in through our own, it must be. i'd love to sit down with all the guys from tool and talk about what exactly they feel when they play or when they write, though they might get tired of people wanting to just talk about them. but it all leads in other directions, intertwining with so much in our lives.

[bottom_feeder99]

ATO

I really think your thoughts on the CD were interesting and I have a sugestion on how Ticks and leeches could be considered as the time where Maynard was pissed at the other member in this realationship....

"Hope this is what you wanted. Hope this is what you had in mind. Cuz this is what you're getting. I hope you're choking. I hope you choke on this."

Therefor I do think Ticks and Leeches has a place on the CD where by Maynard has given up on the relationship and decided to dicover himself as you said when you were speaking about the song Lateralus.

Of course this is just an opinion.

[ATO]

That is an interesting thought bottom_feeder. But I think that even if it was about being pissed at the other members in the relationship it would have to come before Parabol. The album seems to be a sequence of events in a relationship and Ticks and Leeches sits directly between the birth of something new and the voyage of self discovery. It really should be placed right after Schism, or possibly right before, to truly fit in the albums flow.

But who am I to question the way Tool laid out the album?

I usually end up listening to the album straight through, but always skipping over Ticks and Leeches just because it interrupts the flow. I love Ticks as a single, it has amazing drum work and Maynard's voice is chilling, but I'll never see it as part of the Lateralus whole.

[Metatron's Cube]

I think, like any great work of fiction, many perfectly accurate symbols and interpretations can be made about the exact same thing. The room for interpretation reminds you that there is no absolute right, and what YOU think is what really matters, (kind of like the Christian bible).

That’s why I think the relationship idea is perfectly valid, and creative, but I think there may be something deeper. I think lateralus is the apex in an album that describes an auto-biographical shift in thinking, or enlightenment. It could be you, maynard's, or anyone's story.

I think the "lateral" thinking (the anatomical reference to outside as others have mentioned), is all about living for the moment, and the experience. Its saying the plan of God is infallible, there is no wrong, no way to fail. By living and experiencing you are perfectly fulfilling it. To over-analyze, through trying to figure out what should do, or feel guilty for what you didn’t do, you lose the purpose. It is simply to live, to experience. So to do this most effectively, maynard speaks of "Reaching out to embrace the random. Reaching out to embrace whatever may come." , or "Feed my will to feel this moment ". He warns that "Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind." To me, this separation of the mind and body is divorcing yourself from what you experience, by fretting about what you ought to be doing.

By embracing the random, you live in the moment, you feel connected. You can experience and love without fear or guilt. I believe this is what faith truly is. In the random is a wisdom that escapes us. By throwing your faith into the fact that everything is as it should be, you do not have to worry about resisting evil, or saving your soul. To do a thing for an "eternal reward", or to protect your ass from an angry god, is lesser motivation than doing a thing out of love and faith in everyone and everything.

Who knows what Maynard really meant, but this is what I like to think about when I listen to it.

[ATO]

Oh, I totally agree that there is much more to Lateralus than a story about a decaying relationship. I was merely showing how I see that Lateralus is based around the story of a decaying relationship. The relationship is its base template, the vehicle by which it can explore much deeper issues. If all Tool had to say was a short story about a relationship, then I really doubt they would have built the fan base they have (but who knows considering the fan base pop stars like Avril Lavigne have built out of far less).

Truly, Lateralus is far more about self discovery, the forging of new identities, the birth of new life, and discovering more than just yourself then it is about a relationship between two people. But looking at it as a story about a relationship can provide new listeners with an easy frame of reference with which to understand the base meanings of the songs and use this new knowledge to develop their own thoughts in time. Not every listener of Lateralus will have spent the thousands of hours you and I might have on Tool's previous works or in subject matter related to Tool, so it is doubtful they can make many of the more hidden connections as easily. But a simple mental layout of the album can help them unlock other doors for themselves.

[Over The Rainbo]

if you read the faq it talks about a lawsuit between tool and their record company. The company made an error and tool thought that they were out of their contract and a lawsuit followed, i think that had a HUGE effect on Lateralus. The decay of the realationship with thier record comp. and everything that happened between aenima and lateralus.