10000 Days to Cairns

Well, 10 hours to Townsville today at least.
I'm writing this while waiting to be picked up for a road trip to Cairns this weekend.
I just finished listening to my new Tool CD, 10000 Days. It't technically not due out until tomorrow, so a big thumbs up to my local CD store staff for doing a dodgy for me. Support your local CD store. Yeah.
Anyway, I thought I'd use this time to do a quick first impressions of the album.
Wow. It's good, but it's also a departure from the last 3 albums. In a way, you can sort of see a bluring between A Perfect Circle, and Tool with this album. But that's OK, as they are still stylisitcly two seperate entities.
The main thing I got from this is all about art. I think they have really streched to the limit what they as a band can get away with whilst still retaining accessablity for non-muso fans. The Wings for Marie songs are a huge departure from your standard sweaty, shaved head, 6' plus fans type of song. This album is all about the band evolving as artists. I can't help but think that the Mars Volta has really helped in paving the way for making these swirling epic type songs more acceptable from a consumer stance. That said and done, this isn't some drowning depth prog-rock concept album. More a collection of musical vignettes.
I've always been a fan of the prog-rock side of tool more than the thrash side, and they've really come through for me in this album. It's going to take a lot more listens than just one to fully digest it though.
Thematiclly, there's lots of religious undertones, mostly in a dyphemistic way, as well as a sweet little song called Rosetta stoned, which makes me wonder if Maynard has an interest in psychiatry, as it's a pretty graphic depiction of a schizophrenic psychotic episode. Fun for the whole family there.
As a complete album, it seems kind of short even though it comes in at more than 75mins. For now I'm probably going to give it a 4, and privately enjoy the fact that there are a lot of metal head Tool fans that are going to completely misunderstand this album and hate it.
You gotta love a band that purposely alienates a huge contingent of it's fan base in order to do some artsy posing.
More soon when I get back from the Cairns roadtrip.