A Perfect Circle: Mer De Noms : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Rush, the mid-seventies titans of stun-gun hard rock and songs about forest gnomes, must have been a formative influence on Billy Howerdel. A guitar tech for Tool, Howerdel began his own group, A Perfect Circle, as a labor of love and a vehicle for writing theatrical instrumental rock for weird imaginary movies. Then the guitarist shortened the songs, imagining them as diva turns. Enter Tool's occasionally dress-wearing singer, Maynard James Keenan, who added an almost operatic angst to Howerdel's songs and who characterizes A Perfect Circle as "a right-brain, feminine result." Eccentric, melodramatic and perpetually yearning for transcendence of some sort, Keenan blesses the strafing, Smashing Pumpkins-damaged riffage of "Judith" with biblical references, including lyrics like, "He did it all for you." Howerdel's trippy atmospherics are compelling in a corny sort of way, and Keenan's howling, swooning style must be an antidote for any boy feeling guilty about being part of the patriarchy. But when the singer is wailing to his audience that he can "heal you" (in the roiling rock fairy tale, "Sleeping Beauty") and the songs rise and fall like the dusty curtain in a high school auditorium, A Perfect Circle return us to the daze of prog rock. Still, Genesis, Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and even Rush, silly as they were, engaged in an innovative reimagining of what rock music could be. A Perfect Circle sound like a desperate dream of what rock used to be. Maybe that's the point. (RS 842)

PAT BLASHILL