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Originally Posted by Graymalkin
This was my fourth Tool concert and unfortunately also the least exciting.
The show was a bit too short. As someone said in a previous posting, two more songs would have been great (The Pot and Parabola perhaps).
What really pissed me off though was MJK's behaviour on stage. I have to confess, my feelings towards him are a bit ambivalent. On the one hand he's a great singer who writes excellent lyrics on the other hand he seems like a really self absorbed, arrogant cynical person. He rodeo antics during the concert really underline a statement that I read in another posting in this thread : Maynard was mocking the whole show and the audience.
Fortunately from the position I was standing he was hard to make out at times.
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I sort of agree.
I didn't like it. Maynard was all like "lets get this done quickly".
I somehow felt that he was just goofing around. This completly destroyed my experience of the concert. It was like listening to a record of worse quality, it doens't feel any alive or animated. The rather short playtime without any encore only added to that feeling.
Anyway.. onto more details. The instrumental sound was really great. First of all, the acoustic at Phillipshalle are superb. Secondly, they played very precisely with hardly any sloppiness. There were also some nice variations, which is good.
Maynard on the other hand was not so good. I almost couldn't hear him. He somehow cheated himself out of parts where he _actually_ has to scream, like
Vicariously I / live while the whole world dies
I wouldn't say that it sounded horrible. I just couldnt hear anything. It was like they took Maynards whisper and sent it through the amp back and forth.
They didn't play 10,000 days, which disappointed me a lot. But reconsidering the show, it didn't surprise me. 10k days is actually the only song on the album which goes without technical voice compression/manipulation/whatsoever. It's the only song that lets one fetch a glimpse of Maynards vocal power. For some reason Maynard decided that he didn't want to sing on this concert, so they didn't play 10k days.
The show itself was very poor. Not that I would care if the rest would have been great, but it just fits into the sloppy scheme of the concert, and probably the whole tour. Its all up to you wheter you like the rodeo-thing ( Probably he's telling us that the show is 'gay', see ænima booklet for further refernce ) he's got going on there, I certainly dislike it, but theres not much arguing about the video show. They had this many-eyes theme in store, and thats it. The rest was graphic nonsense and the 1996's claymen.
Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't ever meassure a concert by its video show. But I have to compare the concert to the 2001 one (hoho). This concert was so awesome in every aspect of its awesomness(?) that it needs to be mentioned here. The video show back in the days was just fascinating and almost benumbing. They had a better screen too, so meh..
I could understand anyone saying "the show was great!". But I missed the Maynard in a Maynard concert, it felt all sterile, dead and cold. Im not the biggest fan of standing in between a bunch of sweaty people, so I could have as well listened to a record.
Nevertheless, I still had a very good time with a friend of mine, which was good, so it wasn't entirely for nothing.