04.

Tool
10,000 Days

At times, this album is untouchable. If it was all of the same high quality as tracks such as ‘Vicarious’ or ‘The Pot’ this would be one of the best albums ever made. As it is, it is merely exceptional. One could make a good case for it being the best of Tool’s albums. It is certainly the most ambitious, and for a band like Tool, that is saying a lot. I suppose this counts as the first metal album to make it on to this list, but Tool move so far beyond the constraints of the traditional metal framework that I’m not sure if that term ‘metal’ actually applies to them. They have always been uncompromising. No publicity (or as little as they can manage). The music is all that matters. But, then, their music is uncompromising too. If they want to do something they will, and to hell with whether people like it. This holistic creative freedom approach has led to, in my view, this band being responsible for two of the best (if not the two best) metal albums ever.

With 10,000 Days, Tool have moved still further from the mainstream, and, I would say, the album represents their least accessible work. The plus side to this is the fact that you could listen to this album a hundred times, and hear something different every time. There is so much going on, so many routes to choose. It is a gold mine, or, as with so much progressive music, a journey. The trouble is that people get lost on journeys sometimes. There are parts of 10,000 Days that I still don’t fully understand (I’m not sure if I like or dislike them: I simply have not comprehended them). When this album is good it is better than anything else going. But the freedom that makes that possible comes at a price, and that price is, it would seem, quality control. This album has the potential for me to return to it in ten years and realise that it was the best album ever made. At the moment, though, I see it as a flawed masterpiece.