A Perfect Circumvolve's Eat the Elephant Isn't Going to Revive the Flagging Fortunes of Alternative Rock

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Some bands just accept a taste for Big Topics. In the case of A Perfect Circle, the taste had always been accompanied with peachy expectations. Centered on guitarist Billy Howerdel's songwriting, the band, whose new album Eat the Elephant is out today, was conceived equally a supergroup of sorts. Maynard James Keenan, the vocalist for Tool (for which Howerdel had served as a guitar tech), offered to lend his phonation; he was shortly joined by Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, and John Freese, a drummer who had played with Devo and Guns 'N' Roses, while Paz Lenchantin (currently the bassist for the Pixies) and guitarist Troy van Leeuwen rounded out the lineup. APC's 2000 debut Mer de Noms presented a sound at once familiar and hauntingly strange. Instead of contrasting with the circuitous bludgeoning of the Tool lineup, Keenan's high, rich voice melded with Howerdel's gentler arroyo to melody. The guitars still carried a dissonant, alternative edge, but blunt strength never prevailed. As the band'southward name suggested, this was a project built on curves instead of right angles.

Actualization right equally the nü-metal wave was cresting, Mer de Noms and its 2003 successor, The Thirteenth Step, offered relief for fans and critics eager for a change from the visceral lowlife nü-metallic connoted but unwilling to back off from the alt-stone ethos entirely. That APC emerged from the bowels of Tool, whose submerged tones and gross-out content had inspired the likes of Limp Bizkit and Korn, was an added bonus. For one time, you lot could bask in Keenan's angelic vocals without bathing in sludge at the same time. The band wasn't quite easy listening, just it was certainly easier. The lyrics' intellectual pretensions were wrapped in a pleasing cloak of symbolism, foreign vibes, and songs titled afterwards female person names. "Judith," the major hitting from Mer de Noms, is a prime number example: Named later on Keenan's female parent and charged with his fury at the excesses of the Christian religion, the song carries a heavy payload, but gracefully. This was metal as cruise missile instead of main battle tank, and information technology blew upward capably; both albums went platinum.

The follies of religion and other forms of mass mind control were a primary theme. Farthermost individual suffering was another, particularly on The Thirteenth Step, whose title references the 12-step plan and whose material focuses on the ravages of drug addiction. Finally, there was opposition to war: The band'due south third album, Emotive (2004), released in the wake of the Iraq invasion, is a series of inventive, sometimes baffling covers whose source material — Lennon's "Imagine," Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On," Fear's sarcastic "Let'due south Have a War," — is united by a longing for peace. As Rage Against the Motorcar's Renegades, released around the same fourth dimension, shows, covers albums tend to serve as concluding calls for the bands that put them out, and Emotive was no exception. In 2005, the slices of the circle went their separate ways, and though the ring has reconvened to tour occasionally since, progression on a new collection was halting at best. Then Donald Trump ran for president.

Trump's election and its aftermath seems to accept lit a fire under Howerdel and Keenan — specially, it seems, the latter. The sonics of Eat the Elephant are mellow, at times too mellow to compete with lyrics that have gone clunky and a bit steroidal. All the old themes accept returned. The title track centers on suicide and originally included Chester Bennington. Pb single "The Doomed" is a biting inversion of Christ'south Sermon on the Mount: "Blessed are the gluttonous: may they atomic number 82 the states to famine and state of war." On "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" a barrage of celebrity deaths — Gene Wilder, Carrie Fisher, Muhammad Ali, David Bowie, Prince — is likened to the abandoning of a doomed World by dolphins in Douglas Adams'southward Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Along with many others on the anthology, these are grim signals to fit grim times, simply without more seize with teeth from the guitars and less portentousness from the words, the art doesn't concur upwards most besides every bit could accept. If you lot'd forgotten how possible it is to go irritatingly didactic and dour while criticizing systems of mental command, Keenan's more than ready to remind you. That said, his voice hasn't lost its pleasing, smoothen, and vaguely British texture, and Howerdel'south songs, even if they sometimes lack vigor, are executed with graceful intelligence and occasional novelty. "Hourglass," for instance, is an intriguing venture into digital distortion. Eat the Elephant isn't going to revive the flagging fortunes of alternative rock or give rise to any protest anthems, but at the very to the lowest degree information technology's a curious experiment, which is something more than most reunited bands are capable of. It'due south in this aspect that A Perfect Circle gives u.s. some hope for its own hereafter, though none for the world itself.

A Perfect Circle Goes Soft and Heavy on Eat the Elephant