So I've been a TOOL fan for a long time now. Going on 16 years if memory serves me right. But to this day the best album to come out of them has to be Lateralus which came out in 2002. The tour for that album was hands down one of the best concerts of my life.

I was a fan of the title track off the album, Lateralus, for several years. And then I saw this video from a college project on Youtube and it literally changed how I saw the song, the album, and the band forever. And ever since then anyone who I crossed paths with that said they liked the band, or even heard of them, I made sure they saw this. If anyone likes the band, rock in general, or is a math nerd they NEED to view this. Even if you've heard the song before and may know the concepts already, there's still some new information that isn't widely known.

Take 10 minutes, set it aside and seriously focus on the message. The background pictures of space from Hubble are pretty awesome too.

protip: while intoxicants of any kind will make this far more enjoyable, I find this to be a perfect THC song. Good for deep thinking. Headphones are a must in any state. Full screen for best visuals.

The Fibonacci of Lateralus

Spoiler alert for those not wanting to watch the video

Spoiler

What really got to me, was the fact that the ENTIRE ALBUM was written around this song. The whole rearranging of the tracks to the Fibonacci sequence and making it one long composition blew my mind. And totally changed the album for me as now it's in that order in my playlist, because that was the original recording before it was cut up and changed for the masses.
6,7,5,8,4,9,13,1,12,2,11,3,10

Lets not forget the time signature changes (every other measure having a different time to it) which makes this song next to impossible to cover properly. Which raises my opinion of the band. Only REALLY GOOD musicians will be able to play this song right. If they can even play in a different time relative to their band mates to being with (the soft part around 6 min the drums are in 5 but the guitars are in 6)

In a world of Gaga's and Beibers, it's nice to know there are still some intelligent artists out there. Math rock will always have a special place in my heart because so very few people have the courage to do it, and do it well.


Your thoughts?

 

Ah, I love this bit of trivia. I remember falling in love with Lateralus when I was younger and then hearing about this right before seeing them live and it just blew my fucking mind. What gets me is that they barely wrote this album in each others presence at all. The guitarist never told Maynard what he was doing, Maynard just picked up on it and wrote the lyrics to match it.

They're all geniuses. I recommend everyone should listen to Schism over and over again as well and try find how many different things the lyrics relate to perfectly. I think we counted more than twenty things it works with just insanely well. Fuck yeah Tool!