dxs

Well, there's something fairly obvious about it.

TOOL begins by starting the intro of Crawl Away 17 seconds late. In the meantime, you're thinking, "wait, when's it starting?"

You crank it up. You hear an irish jig/carnival song/mexican music/whatever be your prediction, and when those seventeen seconds are up, Crawl away comes down hard on you to blow your eardrums for a few good seconds.

I think it's a way to express and feel surprise.

For a while, I thought something kind of strange over the song---I thought that maybe the low background music was probably representing the act of "crawling away" which may be defined in some other fine thread, and the loud noise following it being the moment when the thing/person crawling away is caught and dragged back.

I guess that's kind of analyzing it musically.