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The fourth album from this country-rock semi-supergroup, failed to yield any major hit songs like the band's first three releases, yet is, in some ways, 's most interesting and consistently pleasing effort. Released a year and a half after Elan, the group's first platinum album, was recorded at a time when the members of were beginning to succumb to infighting, drug and alcohol addiction, and the omnipresent 'creative differences.'
Of course, these differences were an essential part of the sound, as the group's two principal songwriters, and, had very distinct styles. On, there is a greater stylistic variety than ever and the record is infused with a desperate intensity (perhaps caused by the tension resulting from the members' personal problems) not apparent on other albums. Highlights include 'Headed for a Fall,' a melancholy, -esque, slow rocker; and 'Business Is Business,' a solo acoustic effort.
Undertow (album) 1993, by Tool Undertow was Tool's first actual album. The album's artwork was chased with controversy. When held up to the light, you can see an obese woman being enveloped by the red rib cage. Also, a nude man can be seen in the background. When the disc is removed, a faint. The band had originally planned to develop and arrange Banks's song 'Undertow' further, but its basic track of guitar, drums and piano, coupled with its simple chorus, was strong enough to keep as it was. But Rutherford only wanted to play lead guitar on the new songs from.And Then There Were Three.
Another standout is 'Leave It Alone,' a very un- power-pop song which sounds more like than. The CD reissue of includes three bonus tracks, all of which (especially 'Crying in the Night,' a cover) are as good as anything on the original album.
‘s first album sounded like nothing else at the time. Dark, mysterious, angry, complex, meticulously crafted and loaded with oddly amorphous song structures, 1993’s Undertow confounded both music critics (many of whom tried to lump the band in with the then-popular grunge movement) and early fans who’d been attracted to the more aggressive, metallic sounds of ’92’s Opiate EP, the band’s first official release.And yet, the album – and the disturbing stop-motion videos for its songs “Sober” and “Prison Sex” – clearly touched a nerve with the American public. Despite its challenging material and the band’s insistence on letting their music (and intense live performances) do the talking, Undertow rose all the way to Number One on Billboard’s Top Heatseekers charts, peaking at Number 50 on the Billboard 200 and eventually selling more than 2 million copies in the U.S. The album’s success firmly established Tool as a potent creative force, and helped pave the way for a new wave of progressive metal, even though the band members themselves resolutely refused to let themselves be pigeonholed into any genre. “Our tastes run through Joni Mitchell, King Crimson, Depeche Mode and country,” guitarist Adam Jones told Guitar World in September 1993. “We’re not a metal band, a grunge band, a rock band or a country band. We’re Tool.”.
RelatedRecorded in the fall of 1992 at Sound City in Van Nuys, California, and at Hollywood’s Grandmaster Recorders, and co-produced by the band with Sylvia Massy, Undertow came together much more quickly than any Tool album ever would again. But the album’s creation wasn’t without its struggles, as Jones, frontman, drummer Danny Carey and bassist Paul D’Amour often had to fight to maintain their uncompromising vision.
“The guy who mixed our album wanted to cut up our songs,” Jones told Guitar School in 1994. “He said, ‘I like my steak without fat; I like to trim the fat off.’ We told him, ‘Fuck you, man, you’re not touching any of our songs!’ Laughs He wanted to take little parts out of each song and make them follow the formula of what sells. I don’t want to follow formula. We want to have our own formula. In the end, we got our way.”In honor of the album’s 25th anniversary, here are 10 things you might not know about Tool’s Undertow.1. Many of Undertow ‘s songs had already been written by the time Tool recorded the Opiate EP.Maynard James Keenan and Adam Jones began writing songs together in 1987, and had thus amassed a substantial amount of material by the time Tool signed with Zoo Entertainment in 1992. Two Undertow songs, “Sober” and “Crawl Away,” appeared in early versions on a limited-edition 1991 demo tape called 72826; and according to the band, there were other future Undertow songs that were left off of Opiate at the behest of the record company.“At the time we did Opiate, we had probably about half the songs from Undertow written,” Jones told Revolver in 2013.
“Someone at the label was like, ‘You guys gotta put out your heaviest stuff! That’s how you’re gonna get noticed!’ It took us a long time to figure out how politics work at a record company. Laughs That’s the money side of the fence, so there’s a different perspective. But obviously one helps the other. So we said OK.
We picked the heaviest songs and did this, like, teaser record.”2. The album’s intense, “reactionary” energy was partly a reaction to Maynard’s experiences in the film business – and to the band’s brushes with the Hollywood hair-metal scene.Though rarely one to get into specifics about the meaning of his lyrics, Keenan revealed to Loudwire in 2015 that the album allowed him to vent the frustrations he felt while trying to make a living doing set design in Hollywood during the band’s early days. “I was busting my ass working on movie sets in Hollywood trying to survive,” he recalled. “Rent was high and there was a lot of weird hypocrisy that happens with both the film and music industries. There was a whole dog and pony show which I found very awkward.
So, a lot of those original pieces were inspired by that kind of energy. The music was emotionally driven and very reactionary.”. Tool’s music, he recalled, was also a reaction against L.A.’s superficial and self-consciously decadent hair-metal scene, which dominated the local clubs into the early Nineties. “We were trying to get past all the hair bands and these poofy-haired idiots that were doing their thing, and all the good club space was being taken up by them. There was a great underground movement of music in L.A. At that time that we were really bonding together with them to fight against and create a new scene we felt was more worthwhile.”3.
Maynard shot a piano to death for “Disgustipated.”During the recording of “Disgustipated,” the album’s creepy closing cut, Massy added to the aural nightmarishness of the track by recording Keenan firing four rounds from a shotgun into an old upright piano. Rollins Band guitarist Chris Haskett also smashed the piano with a sledge hammer, earning himself a spot in the album’s credits in the process.There were other odd sonic experiments on Undertow, as well – including on “Intolerance,” the album’s opening track, where Jones used a vibrating Epilady hair remover to achieve some truly wild guitar noises. “On ‘Intolerance’ I used an Epilady shaver and a vibrator against the strings,” he told Guitar Player in September 1993. “An Epilady is even better than an E-Bow – it makes great sounds when you push it against the pickups.”4. Adam Jones kept his guitar head stored in a refrigerator during the making of the album.Back during the early Nineties, if someone talked about keeping a head in their refrigerator, gruesome images of mass-murderer Jeffrey Dahmer would have been the first thing to come to mind. But the head in Adam Jones’ refrigerator was actually part of his guitar rig.
Jones told Guitar School that playing through a vintage 1976 Marshall non-master volume bass head was one of the main keys to his distinctive guitar sound; and since he’d never been able to find another one just like it, he did everything he could to preserve its life, including storing it in his fridge on days when he wasn’t recording his guitar tracks. “It keeps the components in suspended animation,” he explained. “I heard about that trick from someone who used to make Fender amps; they would keep the components in a freezer until they were ready to be used. You just can’t find components for many of the vintage amps. If you have to replace one thing, it’s going to change your whole sound. So you gotta keep your head fresh.”. “People focus on, in a video, what the people look like, so they’re going, ‘OK, let’s develop this person’s personality,'” Keenan explained to Raygun in April 1994.
“What the fuck does my personality have to do with what this song is saying? Accounting cycle assignment. I don’t want to do that.
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I don’t want people to latch on to my movements or the way I sound or the way Danny hits his drums. That’s a distraction from the piece at hand. When you look at the Mona Lisa, I don’t have any idea what the artist looks like or what he’s about. I have no idea what that guy is up to, what his personality is.
From the Art Director of BioShock and a team of veterans of the BioShock, Halo, Guitar Hero and Rock Band series comes The Flame in the Flood. The flame in the flood. The Flame in the Flood is a roguelike survival adventure video game developed by The Molasses Flood. The game was developed for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Xbox One. A PlayStation 4 version was released on January 17, 2017. A Nintendo Switch version was released on October 12, 2017. The Flame in the Flood: Complete Edition is a wilderness survival game in which a girl and her dog travel on foot and by raft down a procedurally-generated river. Scrounge for resources, craft tools, remedy afflictions, evade the vicious wildlife and, most importantly, stay healthy in a dangerous wilderness.
I don’t care looking at that piece. Is she smiling? Is she frowning? What is she doing? All these things are entering into it, and that’s the same way you should look at a piece, a video like ‘Sober’ or ‘Prison Sex.’ You should be looking at it in terms of the music and the medium that’s being presented to you. Don’t worry about the rock guys that are doing that shit.
It’s not really important.”7. “Prison Sex” isn’t actually about prison sex.Despite its blunt title, “Prison Sex” is actually about the cycle of sexual abuse. “People are really turned off by the name of the song,” Keenan told Axcess in 1994. “Instantly they think of San Quentin being buggered by your cell mate. It’s not about that at all and it’s not saying that sodomy or sexual abuse is in any way OK.
It’s just a story of someone who is having it happen to them now because they’re fucked up, because they don’t know how to deal with past abuse.”“A lot of time when a child is sexually abused they put it out of their mind,” Jones added in the same interview. “Then they grow up and they don’t understand this unrest that they have in them. They turn to different ways to try to channel it. They become alcoholics or become codependent or whatever.
So what our video deals with is someone who has that happen to them. To channel it, they sexually molest another child.
In the song, it talks about ‘I become full circle.’ And that’s what that means. This happened, I grew up and now I’m doing it to someone else. That’s why it’s written from the antagonist’s point of view is like, ‘This is what happened to me.' Bassist Paul D’Amour wanted to play guitar on Undertow.As Tool’s bassist, Paul D’Amour utilized a trebly attack which seemed to fit the band’s music perfectly on Undertow.
Behind the scenes, however, he expressed a desire to return to guitar, his main instrument – a desire which would eventually led to his departure from the band. Perhaps the most whimsical image in the whole package was the one on the back cover, of a pig standing amid a small army of upright forks, with the word “undertow” shaved into its side. The shaved porker was actually Jones’ pet pig, Moe. As seen in a, Moe wasn’t actually shaved for the photo; the letters were added to the photo after the fact. Also, according to the post, that was the closest Moe ever got to anyone’s fork; he apparently lived to a ripe old age on the desert ranch of Kyuss/Obsessed bassist Scott Reeder.
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