Forget Halloween. The real celebration at Tool's latest stop in town Tuesday night may have been this year's legalization of cannabis in Minnesota.
Seriously, this one was made for the (newly legitimized) stoners. That's nothing to tee-hee-hee about or make light of — just a simple and direct way to sum up the show, and one of the only differences from the band's previous Twin Cities performance last year.
The Los Angeles prog-metal gurus' 2¼-hour performance at Xcel Energy Center oozed the kind of hi-fi visual voodoo and reverberating aural power that have gone hand-in-hand with psychedelic rock shows since the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Tests and Pink Floyd laser-light shows. That the concert happened to fall on Oct. 31 just added to the fantastical fun.
Among the minority of fans who arrived costumed in the crowd of 15,000 were many wearing mohawks, à la Tool's enigmatic singer Maynard James Keenan.
The "frontman" — who again spent most of the show perched at the back of the stage — paid homage to the holiday during the opening song by handing out candy to fans in the front row. Or let's hope it was candy, anyway.
Through the haze that wafted into the arena from both the fog machines and the crowd, Tool got down to business right away on a clear mission to overload the audience's sense.
Tuesday's performance was not wildly different than the band's sold-out gig a year and a half ago at Target Center. It kicked off with the same three songs, in fact: The title track from its most recent album, 2019's "Fear Inoculum," followed by "Jambi" and "The Pot," each from the record before that, 2006's LP "10,000 Days." Yes, there was a long gap in between.
More repeats came later, too, including the 2001 oldie "The Grudge" and several more from the last album, such as "Descending" and "Pneuma." The trippy lighting effects, lasers and big-screen videos varied also basically felt the same as before — the videos offering the kind of creepy clay-figurines and fiery, darkest-depths-of-Mordor imagery that have long been part of Tool's toolkit.
