10 Best Metal Albums Of The 90's
1. Aenima-Tool
When the band first started tearing up the metal circuit, many didn't really know what genre to classify Tool. The band didn't have the characteristics of alternative nor did they possess the unbridled anger of a traditional metal or industrial act. Once the band went from their debut Undertow to Aenima, the critics were given an important lesson: Tool's music knows no limits.
Whereas the band's debut was more of a straight-ahead metal release, Aenima is where the more zany side of the band started to come into the picture. After letting out their aggression on their debut, Tool started to pull at their sound and mold it into different territories, from the hard rock of "Stinkfist" to the existential meditation on "Forty-Six and Two." Amid the pummeling doom, Tool even found time to put in hilarious interlude tracks like "A Message to Harry Manback," featuring an answering machine message from one of Maynard James Keenan's naysayers.
The album's finale on "Third Eye" is also one of the most cerebral moments in 90's metal, which would foreshadow the band's leap into more progressive territory as they entered the next decade. While the trends of 90's metal changed with every year, Tool came out sounding like nothing else and annihilated all of their metal contemporaries.