A Perfect Circle - Eat the Elephant

The first of two long-awaited and highly-anticipated releases from bands fronted by Maynard James Keenan (the second being Tool’s impending fifth album supposedly coming this year) in 2018, A Perfect Circle’s first fully fledged studio album since 2004’s Emotive seemed to suffer from a similar delayed completion process that’s prolonged the wait new music from Tool. Hopefully Tool’s new album fulfills the length of its fans’ wait as wholly as Eat the Elephant has done so for me at least. I know there are plenty of people who are upset at least a bit about the band’s change in sound on a hefty number of songs on this album (and I found myself pretty surprised at how mellow much of the material was), but A Perfect Circle have really come through with a testament to the ambition their fans questioned in their absence. Not only is it not a lazy rehash of Mer de Noms or Thirteenth Step, it’s not just a lazy stab at gimmicky novelty either. Eat the Elephant is unfamiliar, but captivating in its unexpectedly skilled weaving together of atmospheric sounds in the progressive rock method.

One immediately noticeable highlight throughout the album is the variety of styles in which Maynard sings on this album. From his character-filled swooning on the mellower songs to his sustained comfortability with his gruffer technique on the more sonically familiar material here, not for a second does he sound unconfident and his voice is an important part of the album’s lure toward it and into it.

Indeed, Eat the Elephant has a strange blend of energies across its track listing; beginning with three calmer songs (the title track, “Disillusioned”, and “The Contrarian”) the prominence of the piano in a fantastically un-classical fashion almost takes the spotlight from Maynard’s vocals. What I mean by this is that rather than playing into the typical pattern of using the piano for ballad-y heartstring-pullers, A Perfect Circle apply it to their mixture in more creepy and trippy ways compared to your typical token piano 2000’s alt metal ballad.

Classic A Perfect Circle returns in theatrical and progressive fashion soon afterwards on “The Doomed” and “TalkTalk”, featuring Maynard’s vocal techniques usually populating Tool’s music and bombastic alternative metal climaxes without all the predictable formulaicness that plagues that genre.

One of the album’s unlikely highlights is the weird poppy enigma, “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish”, which references the sadness over recent deaths of famous people in cheeky, symphonic rock sarcasm. It’s a pretty song and, considering they’ve made songs like “The Nurse Who Loved Me”, perhaps it shouldn’t be all that surprising in their catalog.

The album hits a bit of a lull with the reworked “By and Down the River” and the alternative rocker “Delicious”, but the industrial alarm sounds and consistent bass line of “Hourglass” brings it back to its strange atmosphere as one of the more genuinely hard-rocking cuts on the album. I particularly enjoyed the combination of palm-muted guitar crunching and aggressive chanting on the song’s outro.

“Feathers” and “Get the Lead Out” finish the album on a somber, ambient note much the way the album started with its heavy use of piano among the other musical elements the band include setting a finely eerie mood, and the closing track’s plucked string motif contributes to this unsettling feeling just right.

Eat the Elephant is certainly not how I, and probably most people, expected A Perfect Circle to make their return, but what the band brings to the table after fourteen years of absence is more than just commendable. Billy Howerdel makes consistently interesting utilization of the piano in unusual contexts in a way that has really opened up A Perfect Circle’s sound, and Maynard’s expansion of his vocal repertoire within his work with this band has complimented that new openness with lots of character.