Nearly 30 years into the band’s career, we’ve come to expect certain things from the gloomy progsters of Tool. There are the nine-minute tracks, the nightmarishly surreal music videos and album covers, and, last but not least, the pervasive sense of dread that hangs above the band like a dark cloud.
A YouTube video from Nick Proch imagines a different version of Tool—one that walks on the sunny side of life with a remix of “Schism” that shifts the Lateralus single from minor to major key.
The joke is pretty obvious, but the execution of it is really something else. The song itself, each bar and verse resolving on pleasant rather than sinister notes, transforms from unsettling to goofy posi-rock that wouldn’t sound out of place on a particularly ambitious Collective Soul cut.
What really sells it, though, is Proch’s use of blandly cheerful stock video as backdrop to his magnum opus. Gone are the alien-looking, head-bobbing contortionists and stop motion phlegm creatures of the original video, replaced here with close-ups of adorable dogs and playful wildlife, smiling people enjoying nature, and a child looking up in awe at exploding fireworks.
Life is beautiful, friends. Sometimes we just have to make it that way ourselves.