#music

A Toolgasm is a place in a Tool song or album where the listener achieves maximum listening pleasure. ― Urban Dictionary

Whenever I hear Tool playing, I still think back to the Tool show last summer at Rock Werchter. Specifically the whispering of Maynard ("hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey...") kicking off the show with Ænema, followed by a supercrisp guitar intro and very impressive lightning effects. The video below shows the start of that show.

That was a quite an impressive gig, probably the most impressive live performance I've ever seen (together with Pearl Jam in 2007 and Neil Young in 2008). Personally, I would classify the start of that show as a Toolgasm ?

I though it would be cool to share my personal Toolgasm top 5:

1. Stinkfist (4:18)
2. Right In Two (6:43)
3. 7empest (14:15)
4. Descending (7:07)
5. Culling Voices (6:50)

Those last 3 songs are from the latest Tool album "Fear Inoculum", which is definitely worth a listen.

Caution: the links above will jump you straight to Toolgasm! For the best experience, listen to the songs from start to finish off course ?

I really love this performance by the Smashing Pumpkins. It has that nice big dynamic range (loud-soft-loud) which you can also find in Pixies and Nirvana songs.

Corgan kicks in the song at around 1:20. After a quiet section, ending with a very nice camera angle at around 6:57 (check that crowd surfer), the song explodes while the camera zooms out to cover Jimmy Chamberlin kicking the drums hard! At 7:25, guitar noise leads in the final part of the song and our crowd surfer appears to be having the time of his life :-)

If I would have to make a list of favourite live festival performances which I attended, it would look something like this:

• Papa Roach - Pukkelpop 2001
• Foo Fighters - Pukkelpop 2003
• R.E.M. - Werchter 2005
• Queens Of The Stone Age - Werchter 2005
• dEUS - Werchter 2006
• Pearl Jam - Werchter 2007
• Neil Young - Werchter 2008
• Oasis - Werchter 2009
• Grandaddy - Pukkelpop 2012
• The Stone Roses - Pukkelpop 2012
• Pixies - Werchter 2014
• The War On Drugs - Werchter 2015
• Paul McCartney - Werchter 2016
• Thee Oh Sees - Pukkelpop 2016
• PJ Harvey - Pukkelpop 2017
• Ty Segall - Pukkelpop 2017
• Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Werchter 2018
• Nine Inch Nails - Werchter 2018

However, one particular show I wish I could've attended, is the 1992 Pearl Jam concert at Pinkpop. None of the concerts in the list above impressed me as much as that one. The energy of the band and crowd atmosphere amazes me everytime I look at the live footage. And I'm still impressed by Vedder's famous stage dive during the song Porch :-)

By the way, the Pinkpop 1992 line-up was quite impressive in general: right in the heyday of the Grunge era, both Pearl Jam and Soundgarden were performing. Add to that PJ Harvey and The Cult and you get a pretty nice day of rocking out.