In 2019 TesseracT guitarist James Monteith told Prog about his appreciation for Tool counterpart Adam Jones and the creativity of his band’s work, especially in the 1990s.
Tool are definitely a game-changing band. They’re one of those bands from my teenage years that made me rethink my whole approach to music.
The two prog bands I first got into were Tool and Dream Theater. But while Dream Theater always blew my mind in terms of epicness, with Tool it was more the compositions.
Dream Theater is like massive rock music gone crazy, intentionally clever with complex time signatures, whereas Tool are less in-your-face. But once you start paying attention to their intricacies, the textures and atmosphere, you can see the cleverness.
I remember when I first heard Ænima in the 90s. Adam’s guitar playing – not sticking to regimented lengths of time, and also the way his guitar interacts with the bass – was a key inspiration.
An example of something really clever and subtle he’s done is with Schism. Adam used very simple, single picked notes with delays, creating massive soundscape and atmosphere. He’s invented so many other little tricks.
On the Ænima track Eulogy, there’s this weird clicking sound at the beginning. It’s Adam picking the strings behind the bridge – which I never realised until years later. There are loads of things like that in his work, really outside-the-box thinking in terms of guitar playing.
Tool always have really interesting sounds and you never really know where they come from. Each instrument stands on its own and does its own thing, yet they all work together to create a very unified, incredible sound.
The way the band groove together is a key thing – they lock in and deliver really interesting riffs in a way that makes them sound simple, when they’re not simple at all!
Tool are one of the most pioneering rock bands, definitely in the 90s. I don’t know if they’re always classified as prog, but I firmly believe they are – they were doing things no other rock band was doing, not just for song structures but also the tones. And for me that’s what prog is: doing new things that inspire generations after them.
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