Project Description

A Perfect Circle

Eat The Elephant

Album Review

Reviewer: Jarrod Henry

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Fourteen years is a long time between drinks for most bands when it comes to album releases. For A Perfect Circle that’s just a drop in the ocean. Much has changed in the world since the art-metal supergroup released their last full album, 2004’s eMOTIVe, and yet vocalist Maynard James Keenan still finds much that dissatisfies him on this, the band’s long awaited fourth album Eat The Elephant. Some things don’t really change, it seems.
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Whereas APC’s previous studio offerings were towering slabs of progressive, emotional, psychedelic metal, Eat The Elephant finds the reformed band in a dark, angst-ridden corner inhabited by moody down-tempo sound poems punctuated by grandiose piano lines and strings. It’s certainly a far cry from the likes of Judith or Passive, a fact that is sure to polarise fan and critic alike, especially the former for whom the announcement of a new APC album was like the Second Coming to Christianity.

The title track sees Keenan firmly planting a middle finger in the direction of those who’ve spent a decade and a half yearning for more of the same from the band, and yet it’s as if he’s also imploring listeners to just let go of the APC of the past and embrace what they are as an entity now:

“Just take the stand, just take the swing, just take the bite, just go all in”

A little lyrically cliched perhaps, but effective nonetheless. It’s just that the whole thing is delivered in such a maddeningly frustrating tempo that the piece ends just as it’s about to begin. The previously released single Disillusioned offers some relief in its lament against selfie culture, but again it feels as if there’s almost space for the sake of it and it retards the momentum of the song considerably. It DOES allow the focus to shine upon Keenan’s exceptional vocal delivery, which is again absolutely bang on. The man could sing the ingredients for your Nan’s apple pie and it would still sound magnificent. Even so it does sweeten the nature of the track only so much. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish – in a direct nod to Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy novels – is a pean to the seemingly impending apocalypse and name drops several iconic figures who’ve already left us in recent times:

“….Major Tom, and even Leia have moved on…”

It’s also one of the most rhythmically upbeat major key pieces in the band’s canon. A little reprieve from the piano driven doom and gloom it comes sandwiched between.
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And behind much of this sparse, keys-infused landscape is the band’s true musical director Billy Howerdel. It’s hard to reconcile the soaring symphonic arrangements of past records with this new stripped back 2018 model, and yet there is an air of a more mature composition evident here. By And Down The River, TalkTalk and Hourglass come as close the A Perfect Circle of yesteryear as one is likely to get here.

Whether that is enough for most fans, that remains to be seen. Is this the APC album the majority were expecting after a fourteen year hiatus? Probably not. In its defence, however, it is a sombre, sparse affair that shows hints of the underlying menace of yesteryear, and for now it seems that that is all we can expect.

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