10 Songs That Are Meant To Confuse You

Though King Crimson managed to give a lot to the prog rock genre, where's the more recent material to keep fans on their toes? After all, Frame by Frame came out what's coming up on 30 years ago, so we surely must have advanced past something like that since, right? Well, Tool manages to offer up a worthy followup with Lateralus... just be prepared to do a little bit of math to get you through everything.

Even on the album that bears its name, Lateralus isn't even the first song that shows Tool playing around with time signatures, with Schism virtually switching beat structure in every other bar. While Lateralus might seem straightforward at the outset, the DNA of this song has its traces in the Fibonacci Sequence rather than any sort of hard rock or heavy metal that we're used to.

Based on a series of numbers that keeps repeating, the entire song keeps removing and adding in phrases at every turn, from the drumming of Danny Carey to the actual sentence structure of Maynard James Keenan's vocals. Just a casual listen to the first verse shows him leaving pauses to dictate the number of syllables that are left out, going up the Fibonacci sequence before descending down again. Although most of this ties into the themes of a sort of hypnotic spiral, this is the kind of song that you need to let seep into you before you dare to play it yourself.