Thread: 01.25.2012 - Toronto, ON @ Air Canada Center
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sianspheric's Avatar sianspheric
01-31-2012, 02:13 PM
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I'm still pretty happy we got Parabola AND Sober rather than just Ticks and Leeches.

It looks like they've dropped The Pot and shortened things from 11 songs down to 10. So there is no guarantee we would have gotten The Pot. I've never heard Ticks live and I love the drum part but to me hearing Parabola (even without Parabol) > Ticks. I saw Parabola last 10 years ago and it kicked serious ass last week. Hearing Sober also, was just a bonus.

Also the show got a great review from The Star. Well-written review too, Ben Rayner (the Star's music critic) got it spot on.

http://www.toronto.com/blog/post/711...he-best-tricks

Quote:
“We’re a little rusty,” warned Maynard James Keenan one number into Tool’s set at the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday night, which might have been the case but certainly didn’t spell disaster for the show that followed.

A rusty Tool, after all, is a more polished and precise instrument than 99 percent of its peers on the contemporary touring circuit, across all genres. The standard of musicianship required to navigate any one of the Los Angeles quartet’s labyrinthine prog-metal compositions would turn any player not fit for the task ashen with fear. A truly rusty Tool would fall apart very quickly. But Tool – which has issued just four albums and one EP in nearly 22 years of existence – has strict standards. A truly rusty Tool would never leave the rehearsal space.

Tool’s near-unapproachable might on the concert stage is, without a doubt, the reason why it could roll into town almost six years on from its last album, 2006’s 10,000 Days, and still lure a sellout crowd of 20,000 to the ACC for a performance forthrightly advertised as containing no new material. Wednesday’s set list, in fact, didn’t deviate significantly from the one the band brought to Toronto for a third go-’round at the Molson Amphitheatre in August of 2009, the last time Tool came to town touring little but the vaguest suggestion of another studio album. True, there were some stunning new digital visuals interspersed with the usual, spiralling Alex Grey acid mindf---ery and guitarist Adam Jones’s timeless (and still quite disturbing) animated video clips for “Stinkfist,” “Sober” and “Schism” on the LED screens, but fresh stoner eye candy shouldn’t be confused with a display of wanton spontaneity. I’m pretty sure even the dude who got pulled onstage for a drum duel with the superhuman Danny Carey during a climactic pre-encore assault “Lateralus” was sometime Crystal Castles timekeeper Chris Chartrand, exactly the same surprise guest as the last time.

“Who won?” demanded Keenan after the drum-battle racket had subsided, adding after an expertly timed pause: “We all win.”

We all did, too. Apart from a slightly ill-tuned and uncharacteristically tentative slug at Aenima’s “Pushit” – one of those minor set-list deviations I was talking about, and the night’s only real betrayal of rustiness – early in the evening, it had been a fairly faultless slow burn through the aforementioned weirdo “hits” (“Stinkfist,” “Sober,” “Schism”) and the odd, involved epic (“Forty Six & 2”) to the molten, multi-staged musical and visual excesses of “Lateralus.”

During that tune, a scissoring array of lasers was brought in to augment the 18 blazing video screens that had kept eyes popping all night long, and we were well on our way to full sensory overload. After that, Tool didn’t even need to be onstage to keep the crowd enthralled. We willingly watched a couple of guys in the mixing booth play a round of Atari’s Asteroids on the rear-stage screen while a barrage of cycling, electronic ambience droned on through the PA for seven or eight minutes. Then Tool re-emerged to murder us with “Parabola” and a final, ferocious, gratuitously multimediated version of “Aenima” and there was zero doubt left as to who was in charge. The entire ACC was going off in a manner bordering on violent. The old tricks are the best tricks, I guess. It would be nice if Tool came back with a taste of something new the next time around, but it’s probably not essential.
Last edited by sianspheric; 01-31-2012 at 02:16 PM..
Old 01-31-2012, 02:13 PM   #47
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Re: 01.25.2012 - Toronto, ON @ Air Canada Center
I'm still pretty happy we got Parabola AND Sober rather than just Ticks and Leeches.

It looks like they've dropped The Pot and shortened things from 11 songs down to 10. So there is no guarantee we would have gotten The Pot. I've never heard Ticks live and I love the drum part but to me hearing Parabola (even without Parabol) > Ticks. I saw Parabola last 10 years ago and it kicked serious ass last week. Hearing Sober also, was just a bonus.

Also the show got a great review from The Star. Well-written review too, Ben Rayner (the Star's music critic) got it spot on.

http://www.toronto.com/blog/post/711...he-best-tricks

Quote:
“We’re a little rusty,” warned Maynard James Keenan one number into Tool’s set at the Air Canada Centre on Wednesday night, which might have been the case but certainly didn’t spell disaster for the show that followed.

A rusty Tool, after all, is a more polished and precise instrument than 99 percent of its peers on the contemporary touring circuit, across all genres. The standard of musicianship required to navigate any one of the Los Angeles quartet’s labyrinthine prog-metal compositions would turn any player not fit for the task ashen with fear. A truly rusty Tool would fall apart very quickly. But Tool – which has issued just four albums and one EP in nearly 22 years of existence – has strict standards. A truly rusty Tool would never leave the rehearsal space.

Tool’s near-unapproachable might on the concert stage is, without a doubt, the reason why it could roll into town almost six years on from its last album, 2006’s 10,000 Days, and still lure a sellout crowd of 20,000 to the ACC for a performance forthrightly advertised as containing no new material. Wednesday’s set list, in fact, didn’t deviate significantly from the one the band brought to Toronto for a third go-’round at the Molson Amphitheatre in August of 2009, the last time Tool came to town touring little but the vaguest suggestion of another studio album. True, there were some stunning new digital visuals interspersed with the usual, spiralling Alex Grey acid mindf---ery and guitarist Adam Jones’s timeless (and still quite disturbing) animated video clips for “Stinkfist,” “Sober” and “Schism” on the LED screens, but fresh stoner eye candy shouldn’t be confused with a display of wanton spontaneity. I’m pretty sure even the dude who got pulled onstage for a drum duel with the superhuman Danny Carey during a climactic pre-encore assault “Lateralus” was sometime Crystal Castles timekeeper Chris Chartrand, exactly the same surprise guest as the last time.

“Who won?” demanded Keenan after the drum-battle racket had subsided, adding after an expertly timed pause: “We all win.”

We all did, too. Apart from a slightly ill-tuned and uncharacteristically tentative slug at Aenima’s “Pushit” – one of those minor set-list deviations I was talking about, and the night’s only real betrayal of rustiness – early in the evening, it had been a fairly faultless slow burn through the aforementioned weirdo “hits” (“Stinkfist,” “Sober,” “Schism”) and the odd, involved epic (“Forty Six & 2”) to the molten, multi-staged musical and visual excesses of “Lateralus.”

During that tune, a scissoring array of lasers was brought in to augment the 18 blazing video screens that had kept eyes popping all night long, and we were well on our way to full sensory overload. After that, Tool didn’t even need to be onstage to keep the crowd enthralled. We willingly watched a couple of guys in the mixing booth play a round of Atari’s Asteroids on the rear-stage screen while a barrage of cycling, electronic ambience droned on through the PA for seven or eight minutes. Then Tool re-emerged to murder us with “Parabola” and a final, ferocious, gratuitously multimediated version of “Aenima” and there was zero doubt left as to who was in charge. The entire ACC was going off in a manner bordering on violent. The old tricks are the best tricks, I guess. It would be nice if Tool came back with a taste of something new the next time around, but it’s probably not essential.
Last edited by sianspheric; 01-31-2012 at 02:16 PM..
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