Tool and A Perfect Circle's Best-Sounding Albums, According to Maynard James Keenan Audio Ink Radio

Tool and A Perfect Circle’s Best-Sounding Albums, According to Maynard James Keenan

2025-01-17

Maynard James Keenan has announced what he thinks are the best-sounding Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer albums. – Author: Scarlett Hunter, Photo via Paul Harries

Maynard James Keenan is a busy guy, as he heads up a bevy of bands and projects, including Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer. Between those bands, he’s released numbers albums over the years to the point that he has a massive discography.

One might think that at this point, it’s too difficult to Keenan to name his best-sounding albums, because he has so many from which to choose. But, one would be wrong.

In an interview on Thursday, January 16, with YouTube personality Rick Beato, Keenan named his best-sounding albums for each of his projects, and it didn’t seem like a difficult question for him to answer.

Maynard James Keenan’s Favorites

Speaking with Beato, Keenan rattled off what he believes to be are the best-sounding albums that he’s created with Tool, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer. As for what he means by “best-sounding,” Beato said that he wanted Keenan to name the records that have both the best songwriting and overall recording quality.

For Tool, he picks the band’s 2001 opus, “Lateralus.”

“There’s just a balance to it,” Keenan asserts. “There’s some sonics attached to ‘Ænima,’ that’s a very popular one of our albums. But, I feel like ‘Lateralus,’ there were some things happening with that that were unexpected.”

So, what about A Perfect Circle? For this band, he actually picked one of this writer’s top five favorite albums of all time: 2003’s “Thirteenth Step.”

“A Perfect Circle, I think part of the new album, the first half of the new album [‘Eat the Elephant’], I feel like was there,” Keenan said. “But overall, I would think that ‘Thirteenth Step’ is probably the one.”

For Puscifer, Keenan goes with the band’s 2020 release, “Existential Reckoning,” because “we kind of had found our way to this.”

“It’s an eccentric album. It’s definitely a sonic landscape,” he added. “It’s a soundtrack more than it is an album. And I feel like, for what Puscifer is, that kind of is a good intro into the eccentric nature of Puscifer.”

He added, “I think a lot of people respond to ‘Conditions of My Parole,’ because it has more song-songs on it. But, I think ‘Existential Reckoning’ has like the more landscape, cinematic approach that I think is more the core of what Puscifer is.”

Keenan Not a Fan of the the Mix on the Mars Volta’s Debut

Switching gears, Keenan talked about how much he didn’t like the sound quality of the mix on The Mars Volta’s debut, 2003’s “De-loused in the Comatorium,” which was co-produced by Rick Rubin.

“Sonically, it’s just horrendous,” Keenan said of the release. “It like it hurts your ears. It’s compressed to … The energy on the album, and the way that they’re all playing together, his voice is just so incredible, and the playing, of course. But, it’s because they’re so punk rock, and they wanted to record it all together in… room.”

He added, “It just hurts your brain, because it’s just it’s so compressed, so you can’t listen to more than one and a half songs. It starts to really wear on you.” Who knew compression was so bad in a mix? Well, yes, it is when it’s overused.

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Scarlett Hunter

Meet the expert - Scarlett Hunter has written about alternative music for a variety of publications over the past 10 years. She covers alternative and rock for Audio Ink Radio. Hunter is a graduate of Ohio State University. Contact her at scarlett@audioinkradio.com.

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