Originally Posted by
Toadflax
I was thinking about Chinese Democracy earlier in this discussion. I remember reading a review of that album that was basically like, "look, it's good, but it's not 17 years good." I think that's what we'll run into here. It'll be hard to receive the new Tool album as its own thing rather than trying to force it on a pedestal as the magical elixir we've been suffering without all these years and then inevitably being massively disappointed when it doesn't tear a fabric in the spacetime continuum and rain down jellybeans from the heavens.
It's the same reason a lot of us were lukewarm on With Teeth when it came out. Was it a good album? Sure. Was it the six year epic follow up to The Fragile we were hoping for? Not quite.*
*Yes, I know Trent was getting clean and only spent about two years making WT, but that's kind of my point. It's hard to look past that and not just think about how long we've been waiting, rather than appreciating why it took longer than expected.