When Tool went quiet following the release of 1996’s Ænima - their label, Volcano Entertainment, sued them - the two started working on music together. He met Maynard James Keenan in 1992, when Tool opened for Fishbone, and a few years later, Keenan invited Howerdel to move into his house. The group’s mastermind was guitarist Billy Howerdel, the aforementioned bald-headed goon, who worked as a guitar tech for bands including Nine Inch Nails, Smashing Pumpkins, Fishbone, and Tool. It’s also the only truly great record A Perfect Circle ever made. It’s a concise, punchy, focused record that delivers 11 songs and a brief coda in under 45 minutes, at a time of peak CD bloat. Mer De Noms, which turns 20 this Saturday, is one of the strongest debut albums of the 2000s. It took me a minute to connect the CD to the band I’d seen at the Garden, though, and when I played it, I wondered why I’d been so lukewarm toward them that night. I liked the cover art - two bright orange parentheses on a kind of blackened, rusty backdrop, with some weird squiggles running vertically down the center. Something to watch and listen to while waiting for Nine Inch Nails to play.Ī couple of weeks after the concert, I got a copy of A Perfect Circle’s debut album, Mer De Noms, in the mail. But taken as a whole, their 40-minute set was…fine. Their worst songs sounded like radio-friendly power ballads. To me, their best material felt like a cross between Soundgarden and Jane’s Addiction, but lacking the sound of surprise that those bands’ original conceptions had carried years earlier (a decade, in Jane’s Addiction’s case). The songs all sounded more or less the same, except for the ballads. ![]() Their music was chugging, psychedelic post-grunge, sometimes sluggish and other times incantatory. ![]() He looked like the dude from the Black Crowes or something. And their singer was a weirdly retro throwback - he stalked back and forth across the stage, bottle in one hand and microphone in the other, shirtless in shiny pants, with long center-parted brown hair that fell to the middle of his back. They had a female bassist, which still seemed slightly novel even after the 1990s, when every third band seemed to have a female bassist. ![]() He looked like they’d recruited him from a wedding band. The lead guitarist was a tall, bald-headed goon, and the other guitarist was wearing a shiny suit and a shaggy post-hair metal haircut. ![]() They were more like one of the faceless “alternative” acts that played three or four slots down the bill on radio festivals across the middle of the country every summer, back when there were radio festivals. The first band on, though, didn’t seem to be selling the same kind of angsty, industrial rage and despair as Trent Reznor and company.
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