A band that takes its own sweet time to do just about everything, Tool is also one band for whom the two-year COVID lull was no big whoop.
Sunday's postponed Target Center gig by the Los Angeles-reared prog-metal gurus even seemed to benefit from the long wait. About 15,000 fans turned out and turned on in a big way, absorbing the quartet's loudly vibrating rhythms and wicked psychedelic meanderings like nocturnal flowers soaking up darkness.
Fans also had a couple extra years to get familiar with the songs on Tool's new record — a good thing, since those accounted for nearly half of the 2¼-hour performance.
Of course, "new" is a relative term on Planet Tool. The band went even longer than usual between albums — 13 years — before finally releasing 2019's "Fear Inoculum." So those songs are still very fresh in fans' minds.
As drummer Danny Carey, guitarist Adam Jones and bassist Justin Chancellor locked into the title track's low-throbbing groove to kick off the show, fans anticipated the build-up and cheered loudly when frontman Maynard James Keenan walked out from the shadows to begin singing.
"Exhale, expel, recast my tale / Weave my allegorical elegy," Keenan sang ever-so-cryptically. Sporting a spiky mohawk haircut and ghoulish eye makeup, he looked like someone who'd streamed one too many post-apocalyptic TV shows during lockdown.
Always enigmatic and ambiguous in concert — he once again stayed in the dark at the back of the stage the whole show — Keenan was atypically direct as he addressed the crowd in the second song, "Opiate," from the band's early-'90s rise.
"There's been a lot of crazy [stuff] the last couple years, and there's a lot that's crazy right now," he said. "It will all be waiting for you in two hours after the show. Right here, right now, there's only us."
