ÆNIMA

I at first viewed Aenima as a juvenile album. While the music was very nice and the songwriting top-notch, I thought that the lyrics and the angst were fairly over-the-top. Over time, though, I've come to simply appreciate nearly the entire album, despite the lackluster lyrics at parts and the angst that's present throughout the entire album. I've found that Tool is excellent at melding the distorted guitar with the great rhythm section that's present in every track on here.

Songs like Stinkfist, which seem like mainstream hard-rock/grunge radio, are surprisingly really nice to listen to. Other, more progressive tracks such as Eulogy and Pushit are also very well- written and even don't seem to take up the entire 8/10 minutes that they respectively consume from the album. I've even come to really enjoy some of the interludes in the context of the album as a whole, with the sole exception of Cesaro Summability, which simply annoys me.

This album is on the cusp of a 4/5 for me, and deservedly so. I am leaning more towards a 4 for now, but that is subject to change. I disliked Tool at first, but over time I grew to really appreciate their music, and I feel like it really only takes patience for many progressive fans to warm up toward their style.