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Maynard James Keenan has put out quite a few albums between his three band—TOOL, A Perfect Circle and Puscifer—and during a recent conversation with YouTube personality Rick Beato the frontman revealed which album he thought was the "best-sounding" (as in best songwriting and recording quality) from each band.
“With Tool, I think it would be, I think Lateralus,” Keenan began (as transcribed by ThePRP). There’s just a balance to it. 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.”
“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," he continued. "But overall, I would think that Thirteenth Step is probably the one.”
“Puscifer, I feel like Existential Reckoning is the one, because we kind of had found our way to this," Keenan added. "It’s an eccentric album. It’s definitely a sonic landscape. 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. 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.”
During the conversation, Keenan also lamented on how poor the mix was of The Mars Volta’s 2003 debut album, De-loused in the Comatorium.
"Sonically, it’s just horrendous,” he admitted. “It like it hurts your ears. It’s compressed to shit. 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 one fucking room. It just hurts your brain, ’cause 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.”
“That bums me out, because I know that what’s happening in that room when they were doing it was transcendent," he pointed out. "And for Rick [Rubin, co-producer], pulling his hair out, probably trying to get them to separate and make it work sonically. I’m sure he had a way bigger puzzle than he could ever solve on that.”
Watch the full conversation below.