A Perfect Circle

eMOTIVe

Was a little effort too much to ask?

Review Score:

(2/10)
I liked MER DE NOMS a lot. An avid Tool fan at the time, I bought it the week it was released and listened to it more or less constantly for the ensuing two years. By the end of that time, I liked A Perfect Circle a lot more than Tool. If that fact renders my review irrelevant to you, then stop reading here, because it's only going to get worse.

I waited for THIRTEENTH STEP, hoping it would rescue the band from the label "nu metal," which by the time of its release had come to indicate a morass of bands with more piercings than talent, who all copped their moves from the same grunge bands. Once, I listened to bands like Helmet and the Deftones and considered myself a patron of the genre. By the release of THIRTEENTH STEP, I couldn't stand it. Something else was happening too: I was beginning to get tired of Maynard James Keenan. His minor key croon hadn't changed substantially in years, and more ominously, the idiosyncracies that defined Tool were now practically clichÃ©s, and nothing in his newer work indicated an interest in moving beyond that. He continued to pepper songs with the word "moment," pronounced the exact same way each time but with less denotative meaning as the lyrics meandered towards self-conscious mush. THIRTEENTH STEP did nothing to alter this course, and in the meantime featured much flatter, less interesting musicianship than MER DE NOMS had.

As harsh as all of this may sound, at heart I'm a pretty loyal fan. Once I like a band, I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. So, as boring as most of THIRTEENTH STEP was to me, I was really hoping EMOTIVE represented a positive development for the group. Also, unlike a lot of the reviewers here, I like covers albums and generally enjoy them, particularly if the choices of songs are good. EMOTIVE, fortunitely, had a lot of very good choices lined up (with one notable exception; covering "Imagine" is almost always a bad idea). So I was looking forward to hearing it, expecting something very interesting from Howerdel and the crew.

Unfortunitely, this record is nearly the opposite of "interesting." It's plodding, tedious, plagued by the same flatness, the musicianship utterly produced and devoid of energy. As heavily-processed as MER DE NOMS was, the entire thing was still anchored by the interplay between Freese and Lenchantin, which imbued even the dirgiest numbers with a compelling groove. Most of the time, EMOTIVE sounds as though Howerdel composed a bunch of synth loops and Maynard simply connected them with the lyrics to otherwise unrelated songs. "Imagine" comes the closest to its original, in that it sounds like a tone deaf person trying and failing to approximate Lennon's melody. The Marvin Gaye and Fear songs sound nothing like themselves and everything like subpar Nothing Records promos. It's a sorry fact that the most tolerable song of the entire lot would still have flopped alongside cuts from the previous album.

Suffice to say, I'll be obtaining a burned copy of the next one before I buy anything.

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