Maynard James Keenan knows he’s kept you waiting, and he’s not sorry in the slightest. The singer crafted Eat the Elephant, A Perfect Circle’s first record in 14 years, according to the same principles as his self-run winery and restaurant in rural Arizona: time, investment, focus, presence. In a recent Revolver interview, Keenan compared himself to an Italian mother cooking up family dinner slowly and painstakingly, hungry children be damned. “When I start to dig into the content, the melodies, the words,” he explained, his chief feeling is “Get the fuck out. Dinner’s not ready, get out. Need the kids out of the kitchen!” The man’s philosophy as a winemaker offers a similar insight: “Rather than making Metallica or Slayer wines, we’re making Pink Floyd wines. You’re not gonna get ’em in 15 seconds.” A decade and a half—now that’s more like it.
If Keenan is A Perfect Circle’s public face, Billy Howerdel—the group’s co-founder, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist—is its true puppetmaster, presiding over the drama from on high. A former guitar tech for David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, and Guns N’ Roses, Howerdel met Keenan when a then-unknown Tool opened for the iconic ska group Fishbone’s 1992 European tour, which he was working. He’s said that he originally conceived A Perfect Circle as a foray into female-fronted dream-pop, a pitch-black Cocteau Twins. The band took on a heavier shape once Keenan hopped aboard, but the old primordial opulence remained in Howerdel’s bombastic riffs, symphonic arrangements, and dread-laden atmospherics. A rotating cast of all-star session musicians (Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen, Paz Lenchantin) further buttressed the grandeur, elevating a two-man operation to supergroup status almost instantly on 2000’s hit debut Mer De Noms, one of the most stirring, successful albums in modern hard-rock history. Their 2003 follow-up, The Thirteenth Step, was a psychedelic-leaning concept set about addiction that confirmed A Perfect Circle as both hitmakers and experimental heavyweights. (Their third album, Emotive, a collection of covers and reinterpreted material released in 2004, has more or less fallen by the wayside—which is unfortunate, since its lead single, “Passive,” is one of the finest crushers they’ve got on the books.)
With Eat the Elephant, Keenan and Howerdel have gone back to basics once more, though not in the way you might expect. As the first A Perfect Circle album recorded without special guests—save semi-anonymous major-label rock lifer Dave Sardy, who produced the set, and the mysterious “APC drum orchestra” credited with percussion—it re-establishes the co-founders’ chemistry as the band’s distinguishing trait. But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos. Were it not for Keenan’s crooned politicking and the odd outburst, one could easily mistake it for the work of the British piano-rock outfit Keane.
Eat the Elephant’s fatal flaws don’t take long to reveal themselves. The titular opening track more or less amounts to a hearty “fuck you” to the acolytes who’ve spent the past 14 years anticipating another powerhouse like 2000’s “Judith” or 2003’s “Weak and Powerless.” If the treacly pianos and plodding tempos don’t dampen diehards’ spirits, then the chorus certainly will. Keenan rattles off motivational cliches in an unintended, hilariously low-energy Shia LaBeouf impression: “Just take the stand,” he mewls, “Just take the swing/Just take the bite/Just go all in.” Previously-released singles “Disillusioned” and “TalkTalk” are similarly listless, relying on the driving verses for all momentum, only to undermine them with gratuitous, heavy-handed screeds against selfie culture (“We have been overrun by our animal desire/Addicts of the immediate keep us obedient and unaware/Feeding this mutation, this Pavlovian despair”) and that one holier-than-thou asshole glutting your Facebook feed (“Try braving the rain/Try lifting the stone/Try extending a hand/Try walkin’ your talk or GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAAAAY!”). That the band have framed Eat the Elephant as a reflection on the importance of being present only makes the songs’ execution more befuddling: if A Perfect Circle wants listeners to walk away from the album vowing to “put the silicon obsession down” and reconnect with the world around them, then why top-load it with bloated ballads that are more likely to put them to sleep?
Eat the Elephant’s extended “Old Man Yells at iCloud” bit, however grating, isn’t without its silver lining. A quarter-century into his career, Keenan has yet to falter where vocal technique is concerned: The guy could read the tax code in that honeyed falsetto and it’d still sound like a whispered revelation. Between the hairpin melodic turns, deep-throated runs, and silky melismas, his showing on mid-album cut “By and Down the River” is downright Olympian. The effortless choir-boy harmonies coursing through “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”—a sardonic, power-pop pep-rally heralding the coming apocalypse—supply a much-needed sugar spike. And while the piano-driven palette demotes Howerdel’s epic guitar solos to a supporting role throughout most of the album, “Feathers” and “Delicious” are pleasant exceptions. In a wasteland like this, you take what you can get.
