[rating=8.00]
At first glance, A Perfect Circle seem to have done a 180. Your initial feelings about Eat the Elephant, the band’s first album of new original material in almost 15 years, might be decidedly mixed. “Um, what,” you might think as the first bars of the eponymous, piano driven ballad comes through your speakers. It’s jarring, certainly. Especially for those looking for a rehash of 2003’s Thirteenth Step.
A Perfect Circle have never exactly given a damn what you want or expect, however. That’s important to keep in mind. Fans of Tool, lead singer Maynard James Keenan’s first band, might have wanted or expected an album in the vein of Aenima when Mer de Noms was released back in 2000. That’s not what they got. What they got was an album of melodic harmony, one that focused on the beauty of the composition as much as it did heavy riffs. That, too, was jarring.
Now, of course, we know that comparing Tool to A Perfect Circle (or Puscifer, Keenan’s other band) is an exercise in futility. And so, in a way, it makes sense that it would be equally foolish to compare one A Perfect Circle album to the next. Especially in this context, where we’ve lived in a world without APC since the Bush administration. A decade and a half is a long time. Things change. People change. Bands change.
The stylistic shift you experience in the opening moments of the album are in play throughout. Musically, this is a softer, tamer A Perfect Circle. The mood and atmosphere are still foreboding and dark, as is the APC way, but the thundering tracks that punctuated much of their first two albums is largely—save for a few crescendos here and there—absent. Keenan and Billy Howerdel, who has always served as the main creative musical force of A Perfect Circle, have leaned into soft atmospherics of the band, veering far from their more metal aspects.
Largely it works. Even the poppy “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish,” which has an anthemic, arena rock quality, manages to fit nicely into the overall A Perfect Circle oeuvre, even if the driving force of the song feels like something U2 might have put together in the Achtung Baby era. That track makes for a delightful musical breather after the dour tone of the album’s first four tracks, allowing the ear to take a small break before diving back into moody melodies that touch upon despair.
In terms of mood, the band, and specifically Keenan, make no bones about the fact that they’re just about done with your shit. While never overtly political, Keenan’s lyrics do offer more than a few unsubtle hints about his feelings regarding the state of the world in 2018. The frustration is palpable in songs like “The Doomed,” in which Keenan intones “What of the pious, the pure of heart, the peaceful? What of the meek, the mourning, and the merciful? All doomed. All doomed.”
“Delicious,” meanwhile, finds Keenan reveling in some unnamed other’s downfall. “How inconvenient and unexpected and harrowing for you, as consequences tend to be/For the rest of us, so delicious to witness your dread, a wedding just as consummate.” We can speculate who we think Keenan is talking about—a certain someone absolutely stands out as a potential target for his snark—but the who doesn’t much matter. It could be anyone. It might be you.
As with so much of Keenan’s writing, specifics matter less than the idea. His lyrics are precisely general, reflecting overall disdain for certain attitudes and behaviors. If his words hurt your feelings, well, that’s something you should examine. If you think they apply to someone in particular, perhaps it’s worth exploring why you think that is. That’s always been his goal, lyrically. There is hope in his dour declarations, as if he’s imploring us to do and to be better than we currently are.
How we react should tell us something about ourselves. More than anything, he wants us to think and to reflect. To that end, he gives us plenty to consider here. His lyrics are enhanced beautifully by the sonic mastery of Howerdel, who pushes the band in new directions while still managing to walk a line that is definably A Perfect Circle. Maybe, at first listen, it won’t seem like that. Maybe it’ll feel too different, too changed. You might scoff and pine for the old days.
After the initial shock wears off, however, you’ll find that the quality is as good as it’s ever been and see that they haven’t changed as much as you might think. In fact, after a few listens, you might find that you’ve come around, full circle.
