In many ways, Tool’s back catalogue – a collection of songs three decades in the making yet only five albums deep – is less a discography to be listened to and more of a puzzle to be solved. Together, drummer Danny Carey, bassist Justin Chancellor (or his predecessor Paul D’Amour), guitarist Adam Jones and vocalist Maynard James Keenan are a band apart. It’s not just in the deep, dense, vertiginously complex music they make, either, but in their often contrarian approach to conducting the business of being in a band; their unwillingness to be steered by their own success, and their insistence on delivering greatness on their own stubborn terms. Following their story step by step, song by song is the only path to enlightenment for their (many) obsessive devotees. So many of their indiv...
