more live audio remasters comin’ atchya- Paris 2022, Los Angeles 2024
Live at Accor Arena, Paris, France, 12 May 2022.
So you may have heard about this show, but not for anything the band does or plays on stage. This one is all about the Italian guy.
So there’s this Italian guy within earshot of the person recording the show. He wants desperately for them to play 7empest. He’d probably sell one of his kidneys right then and there if it guaranteed that they’d play that song. The band played this song only a handful of times on this tour, so it’s not like he didn’t know the odds. You hear him right before The Pot launches, shouting out his request, not that the band has any chance of hearing him. But, he’s determined, and will do the only thing he can against the longest of longshot odds to cajole the band to play this epic fifteen minute track with all the twists and turns and enough guitar solos to make David Gilmour and Jimmy Page jealous.
But, as it happens, at about an hour and fourteen minutes into the show, the heavy metal gods were looking down on this gentleman this evening. Against a-million-to-one odds, the stars aligned, and as Adam plays the first few notes of this guy’s favorite song, the Italian guy genuinely, completely loses his shit in the most heartwarming, most ecstatic, most touching display of Tool fandom any of us will ever hear.
All love and respect to Italian guy. Homeboy must have been in heaven for those fifteen minutes, and must have been walking on clouds for a good week or two after the show.
Also worth mentioning- goddamn this show sounds good. One of the best. Best sounding live version of 7empest? Almost certainly. Right in Two is a bit of a live rarity as well, so it’s nice that this one is included, too.
Live at crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles, 15 February 2024.
This is the one with the version of Descending with the additional lyrics towards the end. Also an extended version of Jambi with superstar lap steel player Matt Bradford.
The person who posted this one to YT really did a good job with mastering it. Usually I’ve gotta start from the ground up, but this one was already 50% there in the first place, maybe more like 75%. But, I gave it the minutiae-y final touches that it needed, so now it sounds super pro. Among other things, I thought Justin’s bass was lurking in the shadows a little bit too much for my tastes, so I gave him a boost.
It’s actually kind of a shame that this one sounds so good, because Adam had all sorts of guitar problems this night. I can’t tell what the initial issue is, but the very end of the first track, Fear Inoculum, is a total trainwreck. Guitar drops out momentarily, and when it comes back, Adam is so flustered and thrown off track, that he’s essentially playing a completely different song for the rest of the song. Luckily, the other guys in the band are such consummate professionals that they keep it together and finish out the song. But that was just the beginning of Adam’s troubles. And it’s weird, too, because all of his mistakes in the remainder of the show don’t have anything to do with his guitar not working, because it sounds fine. But I guess that first catastrophic failure threw him off his horse with such force, that he just couldn’t find his way back on. Lots of missed notes, missed chords, rhythmic screw-ups, missed right hand picking. And it’s really odd, because he’ll go through these big stretches where he’s back on his horse, totally on target, totally in lock step with the other guys, and then he runs into, like the solo in Rosetta Stoned, and it’s like he’s totally forgotten how the solo goes. Doesn’t know the notes, doesn’t know the phrasing, doesn’t know the rhythms. He’s fishing for notes the whole time. But then the solo ends and he’s back to rhythm, and he’s back on target again. Bizarre. But because of this audio work that I do with these shows, maybe I listen to them more carefully than some people, and maybe those flubs are totally no big deal to anybody listening to this recording. And honestly they’re no big deal to me, either, because I still love the music and I love the performance and I love the sound, and even a major flub like in that first song doesn’t ruin the song for me. But I’ll go ahead and assume that this is a show that Adam wouldn’t want to be reminded of.
Also, I’m sure that lap steel player guy is a super expert, and he probably makes his own kick ass music, but he sounds completely out of place in the one song he plays here. It’s like Tool all of a sudden goes southern rock / hillbilly jam band. Maybe the idea sounded good on paper, but it doesn’t sound so good coming out of the mains. IMO, of course.
But even with all that, this one sounds way too good to not post.
Both are here, for streaming and/or download-
https://archive.org/details/@anders_albers?query=tool+live&sort=-addeddate
And bloody hell, every time I fix up a couple shows and post ‘em here, I always say ok, these are the final shows I’m doing. No more. I have a couple thousand other projects in the queue, so lemme get to those. But goddamit, I just found another full length that sounds really great in the first place, so this one’ll be a cakewalk for me. So ya, I’ll fix up one more show, but that’s it. Finished, I swear.
