The glitchy, mesmerizing “Chocolate Chip Trip” is a cool song, but it’s not a track most will revisit outside of the start-to-finish album listening experience.
In fact, Adam Jones and Justin Chancellor don’t even add guitar or bass, respectively, to the mix, and drummer Danny Carey only pops up about halfway through - though there’s no discounting the raucous drum solo he contributes. To be frank, it’s odd that “Chocolate Chip Trip” was selected as part of the album’s normal edition while the three deluxe version interludes were cut, because its makeup is similar: fully instrumental, no vocals from Keenan. The shortest song on the standard edition of Fear Inoculum clocks in at a measly four minutes and 48 seconds.
To mark the album’s release, here’s an early ranking of the seven songs that appear on the tracklist, minus the three digital-only interludes. Each track still rumbles along with often speaker-shaking force songs dive into sudden time signature changes frontman Maynard James Keenan’s howl still rings with the fervor he possessed on “Sober” so many years ago. There’s a lot to dissect, yes, but taken at face value, one thing’s unmistakable: Tool is back, and age has not changed the band that’s known as one of the foremost progressive metal acts. Still, early listens to Fear Inoculum are not without their merits.
When it comes to Tool, both then and now, your mileage - and experience - may vary. The digital version adds seven minutes to an already lengthy 79-minute standard release via three interludes spliced in between the original’s seven-song tracklist. The deluxe edition of Fear Inoculum, Tool’s first LP in 13 years, is physically packaged with an HD screen, a speaker and a 36-page booklet that’s meant to enhance the listening experience. So you see what we’re working with here: a quartet with a deliberate modus operandi, not simply in the way its songs are crafted but also with regards to how they’re experienced.
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