1805 Days

While those self-righteous, deluded narcissists in Westminster apparently take a break from undermining a millenium's worth of hard-won liberties, I can talk about something less depressing. Like the new Tool album that's out in a month or so. So far they're telling us it's called 10,000 Days, which means nothing so much as it probably isn't called 10,000 Days. They've sent cover art to Amazon, but I still don't buy it. 10,000 Days just isn't a very Tool title. It's not a made-up word, for one thing. And the tracklist looks like an entirely different band wrote the songs. They always do this though.

The question is, how much do I care? The last album (2001's Lateralus - don't even get me started on their glacial output) was an utterly epochal moment in my life. I've been entertaining the nagging suspicion, however, that I just don't care that much about this one. Maybe when I hear the real titles I'll start getting excited. On the off-chance that they are the real titles, maybe when I hear the songs I'll remember why Lateralus was such a huge deal.

But I'm not sure I haven't simply got past Tool. Sure, the other night The Grudge randomly came on on my mp3 player, and it's still amazing and it still got me gritting my teeth and throwing metal signs in the street, and it still brought the hairs on the back of my neck to attention at the climax. But the fact that this is news is the point. My mp3 player hasn't been on shuffle for ages, and that's because I've been listening to Opeth literally all the time. Of course, when you consistently don't get new material for five-year stretches (Lateralus, likewise, arrived after a five-year wait. That time they had an excuse: they'd been getting sued. This time it pretty much seems that singer Maynard James Keenan was too busy with his more accessible, and therefore more popular, and predictably enough, therefore, far less interesting, other band, A Perfect Circle, who managed one good album before greasing themselves up, finding the very steepest part of the slide into mediocrity and hurling themselves down it with all dispatch, only to find when at the bottom that their own banality wasn't quite banal enough and so soggily embracing predictable political themes and topping it all off with a disastrous cover of the tedious Imagine. None of this, of course, bodes particularly well for new Tool material) you can get pretty bored with what you've got.

But if it's really called 10,000 Days, I'll eat my hat.

I don't actually have a hat, but I'll undertake some forfeit or other.