Having played last night in Winnipeg, legendary Los Angeles prog-rockers Tool perform at Brandt Centre tonight at 8 p.m., before hitting Edmonton July 7 and Vancouver July 9.
Over the band’s 20 plus year career, they’ve made a name for themselves for their visual style and uncompromising resistence to political oppression and censorship. Speaking about the band’s name in a 1994 interview, front man Maynard James Keenan said “Tool is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a big dick. It’s a wrench…. we are… your tool; use us as a catalyst in your process of finding out whatever it is you need to find out, or whatever it is you’re trying to achieve.”
I don’t think the band’s quite as inert as Keenan portrays them to be. Fans might use their music as a vehicle to explore all sorts of different passions and concerns, but they, in turn, are inevitably shaped by the lyrics and hard-driving music of the songs Tool creates.
Backing Tool up tonight is the hard-rocking New Jersey band Dalek. Tix are $57.50, $67.50.
To get you in the mood, here’s video from 2007 of Tool performing “Right in Two” in Atlantic City. It starts out slow visually, but picks up a couple of minutes in.
