Why Tool?

If the “business” side of the music business could figure that one out, we’d have been hit with so many Tool clones during the interminable waits between the five actual Tool albums that have been stingily released over the past three decades that the arrival Aug. 30 of “Fear Inoculum” — the Los Angeles quartet’s first record in 13 years — wouldn’t have been cause for such excitement. But sometimes there can be only one and there is only one Tool. And thus “Fear Inoculum” was cause for a great deal of excitement.

So much excitement, in fact, that “Fear” managed to unseat Taylor Swift’s “Lover” from the No. 1 spot on the Billboard album charts in both the U.S. and Canada within its first week of release, despite being pretty much the opposite of Taylor Swift and “pop music” in general: an evasive, undulating, 86-minute prog-metal epic in which six of 10 songs wind mercilessly past the 10-minute mark.

Oh, and how did Tool achieve this feat? In large part by selling people CDs, the dying physical format that supposedly no one wants to buy anymore.

A mere month after finally conceding to make its entire catalogue available on streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music, Tool sold out the entire first-edition CD run of “Fear Inoculum” — and this despite the fact that it came in an insanely elaborate package that includes a high-definition video screen to play videos for each song, its own powered speaker and a 36-page booklet of LSD-spiked artwork by longtime collaborator Alex Grey, and retails for around $70 (Canadian).

No one needed to buy “Fear Inoculum,” then, but 88,000 people bought the CD version in North America and more would likely have followed suit had there been additional copies out there to buy.

Of the 270,000 units moved during that first week, 247,000 were from actual physical and digital sales of the record, according to the record-keepers at Nielsen, not from the mysterious “equivalent album units” employed by chartmakers these days to take into account streaming numbers. By comparison, Kanye West’s just-released “Jesus is King” did 264,000 units in its first week, 109,000 of those coming from actual sales.

Tool takes up a two-night stand at the 20,000-capacity Scotiabank Arena with support from similarly dark-hued U.K. post-punk veterans Killing Joke Monday and Tuesday, itself no mean feat 29 years into a career that might briefly have dovetailed with the “alt-rock” explosion of the 1990s but which has otherwise never made even a remote concession to mass appeal.

So again, we ask, why Tool? What tactics has this shadowy ensemble employed to achieve its ongoing, unlikely success?

Build a mystique

Tool has adhered very closely to the playbook written by such prog ancestors as Pink Floyd and King Crimson from the get-go, establishing a distinct identity for itself through imaginative album artwork, groundbreaking (and usually creepy) animated videos and immersive concert production rather than the “images” or personalities of its individual members. In an age where social media and tabloid TV have turned a lot of music’s biggest names into the stars of their own running soap operas, Tool still has mystery. And mystery lasts. Mystery will always draw new listeners drawn to the mysterious into the fold.

Even frontman Maynard James Keenan, despite his distinctively menacing voice, remains a bit of a cipher, constantly altering his appearance and usually lurking in the shadows at side stage or silhouetted against a flood of psychedelic visuals during performance.

He’s been more giving of interviews about his Merkin Vineyards winery in recent years than he’s ever been as the frontman for Tool — or A Perfect Circle or Puscifer, the bands he fronts on and off when the rest of Tool is dithering over its next move, for that matter.

It was a rare reminder that there are human beings behind the music, then, when an anonymous Twitter user claimed in June 2018 that she’d been raped at 17 in 2000 by Keenan after an A Perfect Circle show, an allegation that he called “a despicable false claim” and which, however troubling, never went any further than that.

“We wanted people to get into the music, instead of going, ‘Well, how long is their hair?’ and ‘Are they cute?’” guitarist Adam Jones — who’s responsible for most of Tool’s videos and has handled art direction on all the band’s records — told Billboard in 2006, when Tool was releasing its last album, “10,000 Days.” “We just stood in the shadows and worked really hard … We’ve basically used art as a very strong propaganda tool to coincide with the music.”

Create your own thing

After 13 years of recorded silence, “Fear Inoculum” couldn’t possibly have lived up to the wildest of Tool fans’ expectations, but it’s still reassuring to hear the band forging straight ahead on its own path.

“Fear” couldn’t have been made by any other band. Its fusion of complex tech-metal prowess, prog by the pound, psychedelic spiritualism, arcane humour and sneaky melody — the secret ingredient that has allowed Tool the luxury of reaching a larger audience than, say, Meshuggah or Gojira or any number of other metallers trading in similar levels of ambition and absurdly complicated time signatures — simply sounds like Tool. Tool is its own reference point.

Whether you came in here or back in the days of 1992’s “Opiate” EP or the group’s 1993 debut, “Undertow,” chances are you’re along for the ride in either direction. If you are the masters of a unique sound that you created and that no one has duplicated, you are the only place to go for that sound.

Make ’em wait for it

Think of Tool’s working methods as you would its material.

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Although most often classed on the outskirts of the “heavy metal” diaspora, the band has never been terribly generous with the sort of eruptive, big-riff release common to the genre. Even the 1996 benchmark “Aenima” was mostly tension and waiting, waiting, waiting for the explosion to happen, and Tool’s meticulous arrangements have only grown more patient and expansive over time. Tool makes you wait for i, and when those infrequent explosions happen — if indeed they do — they’re all the more explosive for it.

The same applies to its approach to recording. “Not having a new Tool album has sort of become the status quo, hasn’t it?” was how Kerrang! recently put it, before praising “Fear Inoculum” as “a vast, sprawling work, in which every detail, every note and nuance, each rhythm and sound, has been deliberately and carefully placed after much consideration.”

Keenan admitted on the Joe Rogan podcast this summer that he often finds his bandmates’ painstaking modus operandi “so tedious and so, like, ‘Rain Man,’ that I just start f--ing folding in on myself” and that “I’m always butting heads with the guys in the band to get things done, it’s just not their process. (But) this is just the way that they have to do it, and I have to respect it.”

Bassist Justin Chancellor conceded as much to Bass Player magazine in 2016: “Everyone knows we take our time. We’re really trying to be responsible with ourselves in trying to discover ideas that haven’t been discovered before. It’s kind of an alchemy, how we experiment.”

Ironically, drummer Danny Carey recently intimated to a Kerrang! podcast that he feels Tool “actually rushed it a bit” with “Fear Inoculum.” But the mania that has greeted even the most minute change to, say, the Tool home page as evidence of a new album to come over the years between “10,000 Days” and “Fear” is proof positive that there’s something to be said for not overburdening the marketplace with material. After all, how can anyone miss you if you don’t go away?

Give ’em product to sink their teeth into

Tool has bucked prevailing, post-millennial industry wisdom that states the album is “dead” in the era of random, genre-less streams and downloads by hitting No. 1 three times in a row since 2001’s “Lateralus” with challenging records that only make sense if experienced as albums, and it’s done that in part by providing listeners with exactly the sort of esthetic bells and whistles that make you want to sit in front of the speakers for the duration living in the entire “album world” that it’s created.

In much the same way that Floyd or Crimson or Yes or Emerson, Lake and Palmer or whoever would give you a tasty gatefold-vinyl spread to paw over and roll joints on back in the day, Tool has always made its album packaging an immersive enhancement to the music.

The high-tech “Fear Inoculum” spread is kind of a logical one-up from the “10,000 Days” CD edition, which consisted of a hardback booklet of stereoscopic photographs that leaped off the pages in 3D if you looked through a pair of viewing glasses built into the package. At this rate, when the next Tool album surfaces in 2030, it will house a tiny dark-matter reactor that opens a portal into another dimension — or at least to the Tool “shrine” Grey was planning for his Chapel of Sacred Mirrors retreat in upstate New York a few years ago.

Be good

Oh yeah. Tool is a really good band. Conceptually perfect, yes, but also operating at a superhuman musical level. The title track of “Lateralus” was written according to rhythmic stipulates determined by the Fibonacci Sequence, for Pete’s sake, and as a recent Entertainment Weekly review of “Fear Inoculum” noted: “If you are the type of person to use the phrase ‘sick drumming’ in earnest, Danny Carey has helped make the sickest, drumming-est rock record to come out this side of Y2K.”

Moreover, Tool is utterly untouchable live. As contemporary big-room acts go, it stands on the same rarefied level as Radiohead and Queens of the Stone Age and the Arcade Fire. “Everything in its right place,” as Thom Yorke might put it.

I am a cynical, burned-out old music writer and I’m excited to see Tool again this week. Trust me when I say you should be, too.