Does anybody remember when Maynard James Keenan was a respected member of the heavy metal community? Back in the day when the band Tool came out with “Undertow,” we were floored by how creepy and subtle the music was because we were in high school and pretty much knew absolutely nothing about music.
Tool then started making albums with hardly any songs on them. Twelve tracks, four songs. Three minutes of silence or a track consisting entirely of a snare drum and a toy piano may make you look like a tortured genius to tea-totaling art-house metal fans, but to Joe Headbangers like us, it looks like we just paid $15 to listen to a sinister reading of a cookie recipe. In German.
Then, Keenan started a side project, A Perfect Circle, apparently because Tool just wasn’t satisfying his lust for ripping off the public. The band’s latest release, “eMotive,” is a collection of cover songs with a couple of originals thrown in.
The cover songs are neat. Even the most ardent advocate of Keenan’s abject mediocrity will acknowledge that the live cover of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Diary of a Madman” is pretty decent. But putting out an album consisting mostly of covers is just plain lazy and smacks of hollow greed. The only thing lazier than that is putting out re-worked covers of your own songs; we’re looking right at you, Metallica and Godsmack
Not only is “eMotive” all cover songs, but covers of old war protest songs. Yippee. I’m sure when Marvin Gaye wrote “What’s Going On,” he envisioned it becoming a bland, subdued vehicle for Keenan’s political agenda. This is to say nothing of what he did to John Lennon’s “Imagine” or Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” I was fine with him butchering songs by Devo or obscure punk bands, but doing this to Zep is full-on metal heresy.
The Republican Party is the oldest nemesis of rock and metal. With the obvious (and extremely entertaining) exception of Ted Nugent, rock and metal (and the entertainment industry as a whole) have been mouth-frothing zealots against whatever conservatives do. Few things are as annoying as someone using their fame to foist their beliefs on an unwitting fan base as if their wealth gives them license to do so, yet here we are. Thanks, Keenan. You just established a link between metal and Barbara Streisand.
Rage Against the Machine almost had it right. They weren’t very good, but at least those commies had the decency to sound like they had conviction. This album sounds like the only thing Keenan is passionate about is feeling the vibrations caused by classic artists spinning in their graves.
The only good thing I can see coming out of this release is that it will kill Keenan’s career. That way, the next time the frontman of an overrated band starts thinking he’s bigger than the genre, he will see Keenan’s bloated corpse on the highway out of respectability and think, “There but for the grace of God …”