50 Best Rock Albums of the ’90s
1. Tool – Ænima (1996)
Metallica is a full throttle frontal assault to the skull; Tool’s Ænima slices under your skin, tunnels into your brain, and does its devious work from within. Ænima is thrilling progressive metal built on powerful dynamic shifts. They’ll lull you with a long, sullen instrumental passage and then all of sudden you’re back in the center of madness. It also seduces in dark corners and envelopes the listener with a profound sense of unease. It’s ambitious and every moment is precisely thought, even when the tracks turn aggressive and unleash their fury. (-) ions, for example, is a spastic electronic storm, a hurricane unleashed between the atoms. The fourteen-minute “Third Eye” is head-baking in the same way some of Jim Morrison’s longer pieces were. Head-trips that the listener can become fully encompassed within, to see what jags of the human psyche Maynard James Keenen, Adam Jones, Justin Chancellor and Danny Carey have exposed. Mainstream rock radio had the courage to play the album and send four tracks into the Top 30 (“Stinkfist,” “H,” “Ænema” and “Forty Six &2”.) Ænima is the type of album that people will hold onto; they’ll be unraveling years from now in their basements like we do now with Black Sabbath or Pink Floyd. The playing is simply superb, and it has to be to live up to Ænema ‘s ambition. It’s a crazy train ride and every second is a dark thrill.
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