Understanding Fear Inoculum

Alex Grey was 20 years old when he took LSD for the first time.

“Sitting with my physical eyes closed, my inner eye moved through a beautiful spiral tunnel. The walls of the tunnel seemed like living mother-of-pearl; it felt like a spiritual rebirth canal. I was in the darkness, spiralling toward the light. The curling space going from black to grey to white suggested to me the resolution of all polarities.”

If this spiral tunnel sounds familiar, it’s either because you mistook a bottle of LSD for eye-drops or because you’ve been checking out Tool’s Fear Inoculum.

For Grey, this was a pretty important trip. “Soon after, I changed my name to Grey [from Velzy] as a way of bringing the opposites together.” Grey depicted his experience in The Polar Unity Spiral, the artwork which would form the basis for The Great Turn, the artwork and video of Fear Inoculum.

It’s now been 7 days since Fear Inoculum landed. The music has been working on me. The artwork has been working on me. I’ve spent far too long staring into Alex Grey’s swirling psychedelic vortex. And I’ve been pondering the album’s architecture.

Part of the fun of a new Tool album is trying to grasp its architecture, de-code its inner coherence. This (over-) thinking and (over-) analysing of the band’s music can be quite silly and deserves to be taken a good grain of salt, but we only get the chance once a decade, so fuck it. Let’s indulge ourselves.

What is this album? Where does Fear Inoculum fit within Tool’s discography? What inner coherence can we de-code and unravel? Why this artwork? And what’s all this shit about the number 7?

Attentive fans may have noticed that Fear Inoculum follows an unusual trajectory for a Tool album, moving from clarity and resolution (in Fear Inoculum and Pneuma) towards paranoia and anger (in Culling Voices and 7empest). ‘Inhale the clarity’, croons Fear Inoculum. Fuck your ‘dubious state of serenity’, 7empest retorts, now the ‘havoc begins…’

While the trajectory of Undertow, Aenima and Lateralus was that of breaking through, growing beyond, (yeah?) Fear Inoculum appears to offer a regression. Or perhaps it isn’t a regression, but a double-movement, both forwards and backwards — towards clarity and resolution on one hand, and towards anger and darkness on the other.

In The Great Turn we find a character — a twisty-double-figure, reminiscent of the Opiate priest (but with an extra pair or arms), pulled in opposite directions, one head inclined upwards towards the light, the other head inclined downwards and broken open. When we get to glimpse into this broken-open head in the video, we see a great swirling storm. We could name these two figures Pneuma-Head and 7empest-Head, one ascending (‘Eyes full of wonder’), the other descending (‘Petulant stench and demeanour’). A polar unity, held within a spiral. (No fucking way!)

Is Fear Inoculum what we expected from Tool? A small (or perhaps large) part of every Tool fan has spent the last two decades hankering for the band to write Lateralus Part II. Surely, this is where the band’s career should culminate — in the otherworldly transcendence, enlightenment and resolve promised by Lateralus? But instead we finish at 7empest, not enlightenment but endarkenment. ‘Follow the evidence. Look it dead in the eye. You are darkness.’

Fear Inoculum pulls in two directions, like the character in The Great Turn. (Open the CD case and the figure on one side is ascending and on the other is descending. Open the CD booklet and the front page is the figure upright and the back page is the figure inverted.) ‘Eyes full of wonder’ Pneuma-Head on the one hand. ‘Insane and striking at random’ 7empest-Head on the other.

And then there’s the number 7. What’s that all about? Here’s Adam Jones:

“I took a picture pointing to the number seven while we were recording, and a lot of the riffs Justin [Chancellor, bass] and I brought in were in seven. You don’t really go, ‘I’m going to write a riff in seven!’ You just write a riff and you count it out and it turns out to be in seven. Without being too descriptive about the concept, the main thing is that the seven-beat just kept coming up, and riffs in seven kept coming up. It was really weird!

“When we finished recording, I went to the guys and said, ‘I think we should have called the record Volume 7’ because a lot of the songs are in seven and there are seven tracks on the record. Then Maynard [James Keenan, vocals] told me about a whole concept he had about the number seven. We were all, like, ‘Oh My God! This is too weird!’ Then Alex Grey [Tool album artist] basically said the same thing and he has a concept that will reveal itself through video.”

In numerology (which any self-respecting Tool fan studies in their spare time), the number 7 is significant. There are 7 chakras in the subtle body, the 7th being the Crown chakra (located above the 6th, the ‘Third Eye’.) In Christian and Jewish mysticism, 7 is associated with God and spiritual perfection. 7 is the number of enlightenment. But 7 also suggest time passing and a turning, a cycle completed. 7 days in the week and we return to the beginning. Saturn returns after 4 cycles of 7, after 28 years, to lift you up or drag you down, etc etc [insert Maynard scream]…

With Fear Inoculum, Tool has completed a cycle of 7 records, and Fear Inoculum sees the cycle turn, both bursting through the Crown chakra into the light, as one half of the character in The Great Turn video, ‘become Pneuma’. But also, regressing to the mud and grit of the beginning — a many-armed character who evokes Opiate, 7empest evoking the sounds of Undertow, particularly Flood. Sure, we might be ‘sun becoming’. But the waters are still rising around our feet.

Tool has always explored ideas of growth (right?) (and, you know, UFOs and hash cookies and stuff) so does this double-movement provide a perspective on the growth process? Not as a linear progression into the light, but a cyclical process, where the way forward is the way backwards, where the way up is also the way down, and where we return to earlier expressions, more primal influences, to move forward. The spiral turns, and the polarities hold together or split apart. (And sometimes we get probed by aliens.)

And herein lies the genius of Fear Inoculum — it completes the cycle, it encompasses the band’s entire musical career, holding polarities of sound and the polarities of light and dark in unity. It offers us a glimpse of the beyond, while reminding us that our feet are rooted in the mud.

As usual, clues have been left scattered throughout. Listening on CD, when the final track finishes, the CD skips back to the beginning and repeats, the circle turns, the cycle repeats. The track Litanie Contre la Peur is a musical palindrome — it can be played forwards or backwards. On Billboards advertising the album launch, the album cover-image was flipped and mirrored, suggesting two directions of movement. (And the new golden ‘TOOL’ logo, when flipped over on itself, becomes a syringe. Ready for your inoculation?) When the band was touring with a 2-minute preview of Descending, the track was called Ascending/Descending — and this track sits in the centre of the album, pointing in both directions. ‘Rise’, Maynard hollers, even as the waters swallow him and promise to sink everything into oblivion.

This sense of splitting down the middle is found in both the twisty-figure of the artwork and in the title track, where the world ‘mitosis’ is sung at the mid-point (to the second) of the song. Cells divide. Light from Dark. Alex Grey changed his name and made it his artistic ambition to encompass and contain this splitting. Maynard, after all, is a man who used to dress as a woman and paint one half of his body blue and the other half red. And damn, he was hot, but I digress…

So, there’s your architecture. The Polar Unity Spiral. 7 tracks to complete the 7-record cycle. It took me 7 days to understand all of this, and I’m still not sure if it’s the DMT talking through my Crown chakra or the waffles I ate for breakfast. Take it all with as large a grain of salt as you need, but understand this, understand this: Fear Inoculum is some badass shit.