Spiral Out: Practical Wisdom in Tool’s Lateralus
I’ve always appreciated music most when I’m able to witness a band or artist grow and evolve over time.
Lateralus strikes me as one of those rare moments where an already great band makes a giant leap forward. With this album, Tool went from seething and bitter to focused and even optimistic — both musically and lyrically — seemingly in the blink of an eye.
For an album that features time signatures (and maybe more) inspired by the Fibonacci sequence, Lateralus also includes a surprisingly consistent strain of practical wisdom that seems to lean toward stoicism. The album reads like an individual’s journey through and around adversity—through their frustration and their growth and their ultimate serenity.
The stoic ideas of living within the moment and letting go of things you can’t control feature prominently in the album, as do the struggles we encounter while trying to live a good life — things like betrayal, selfishness and strained relationships — and the potential we can find in seeking continual growth and “riding the spiral” to the end.
Rather than dig yet another Tool-related rabbit hole, I thought I’d cut to the chase with this line of thought. Rather than over-thinking or over-analyzing (which separate the body from the mind, as the title track reminds us), I wrote about the…
