Seeing Tool in the daylight feels like a crime. The progressive metal band is best experienced in the darkest corners where its psychedelic fury and dystopic H.R. Giger-esque visuals can fester.
But singer Maynard James Keenan will take what he can get.
“Flight delayed. Set moved up. Storms are rolling in,” he vented during the band’s headlining set on Saturday, wasting no more energy on the unchangeable. “Let’s do this s—.”
Without any hesitation, the quartet ripped through an ear-blistering performance of Tool’s eternal hit “Stinkfist” to start things off, padding it with a hysterical level of volume that felt in competition with the looming thunder. On the screens, the band also played the song’s trippy music video — unlocking Gen X’s repressed nightmares — in order to help give the crowd the full Tool treatment.
Another aspect of Saturday’s performance that felt a little off was that Keenan was absent his usual bizarre costuming that typically aids in the twisted reality, but he gets a pass considering he just recovered from surgery in late August.
“If you’re wondering why I’m hobbling like a granny, it’s because I had a full hip replacement three weeks ago,” he explained, making you wonder how he was even standing, let alone commanding the set. “They wanted me to take things back to January, but I said f— no man, Riot Fest!”
Barefaced, Keenan remained inconspicuous in the back quadrants of the stage, his go-to positioning, giving his bandmates a well-deserved moment in the spotlight. While bassist Justin Chancellor and drummer Danny Carey held down the rhythm section with unbelievable force, the winding atmospherics of guitarist Adam Jones were the real grease in the machine. The show was a homecoming of sorts for Jones, who grew up with friend Tom Morello in Libertyville, the sleepy Illinois town that became the breeding ground for a whole arm of the modern rock movement.
Tool hasn’t released an album since 2019’s “Fear Inoculum,” though rumors have been swirling that the band is working on new material. Yet they’re still riding out the fruits of their early labor, going back 30-plus years ago when they created a new kind of soundtrack in the ’90s that appealed as much to alt-rock kids as it did metalheads. They showed up in droves Saturday night to take in the set, as Tool was the sole headliner that represented the generation.
Making its Riot Fest debut, as the Saturday headliner, Tool was sandwiched in between younger rockers like Twenty One Pilots and Pierce the Veil, headliners of Friday and Sunday, respectively, yet earned its rightful place in the musical continuum.
As Tool wrapped with 1996’s hit “Ænema,” the sun finally starting to set, the prog rockers got their moment in the dark, where they truly shine.