Tool offers lyric, high-minded, violent message

Adam Jones' guitar shrieked the way teen girls once did at Beatles gigs -- teen girls with titanium lungs and their legs caught in bear traps.

On and on it went -- a cochlea-shearing drone that served as a loud litmus test for the capacity crowd at The Pearl on Thursday night, meted out midway through the band's nerve-wringing, time-swallowing set, which was a fist to the jaw of subtlety.

You see, like battery acid and Milwaukee's Best, Tool is an acquired taste.

This is the way the band prefers it -- like rueful schoolchildren chastising a substitute teacher, it revels in testing the audience's patience.

To be a Tool devotee, then, is akin to a certain form of heavy metal self-flaggellation: The band makes the audience earn their fandom with 15-minute explorations of noise and nuance done with the cool detachment of a coroner bisecting a corpse.

But ultimately, this is what makes Tool shows so exhilarating: They're defined by a stubborn diffidence that, like assembling some elaborate jigsaw puzzle, is trying and tedious at times but all the more rewarding once the picture finally comes into focus.

True to form, the band always plays its cards close to the vest.

Its members don't interact with the crowd -- frontman Maynard James Keenan sings from the back of the stage, next to the drum riser, a silhouette largely hidden in the shadows. His stage banter consists of little more than "good evening" and "good night."

When Tool plays, its members don't seem to exert much energy -- with the possible exception of monster drummer Danny Carey, who swings his fists like he's battling an army of invisible assailants -- yet the sounds emanating from the stage suggest otherwise: They're complex, malleable and verbose prog-rock salvos where the band freely indulges in seemingly every impulse, from roaring pastiches of buzzing sound effects to long, dissonant solos to a blinding array of lysergic visuals (flaming eyeballs, translucent fetuses, etc.) projected on a series of big screens that buttress the stage.

The band's fond of, and adheres to, a certain symmetry: Its songs begin at a slow-simmer, a gradually escalating tension, with Jones plucking out ominous, reverberating guitar lines before eventually erupting into a grand climax of cinder-block-heavy riffs and hammered-out rhythms that close nearly every tune.

At The Pearl, the band eschewed the more linear tunes that comprised its early signature hits, no "Sober" or "Prison Sex," for lengthy readings of deeper album cuts.

One such moment was a gripping, airtight rendition of "Flood," the only song Tool played from its breakout 1992 full-length debut, "Undertow," on which the band harnessed mammoth squalls of feedback and zig-zagging bass lines into an epic doomsday dirge whose ending was so concussive, you could feel the rhythms rumble beneath your feet.

Shortly thereafter came another brute, "10,000 Days," a tune that topped the 20-minute mark with more peaks and valleys than a mountain range.

With Keenan's voice floating through the song like tendrils off smoke, the tune proceeded from a meditative haze to a battery of power chords that could have registered on the Richter scale.

During slightly more concise moments, Tool fired off a slew of unlikely radio hits -- "Stinkfist," "Schism," a show-ending "Vicarious" -- songs so dense and malevolent, it's still hard to believe they found a home on the airwaves.

But then again, in harsh times, this bunch is unmatched in terms of crafting a gripping, high-minded violence -- both lyrically and sonically -- and this show registered like an exquisite constellation of bruises, a scab you couldn't help but pick.

"The universe is hostile, so impersonal," Keenan sang at set's end in a summation of his band's apocalyptic worldview. "Devour to survive."

And with that, dinner was served.

Contact reporter Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or (702) 383-0476.