UnderTOOL

Night #1 of a 15 blog post Christmas spree! 

600th post, it's been a long time coming. 

I decided to do another remaster for Tool's "Undertow," as I recently had done Hum's "You'd Prefer an Astronaut." I was one of those who flocked to the video "Sober" long before Beavis & Butthead made fun of Adam Jones's creature puppets. Next year it'll be 30 years of "Undertow" and I'm hoping for an official remaster from Sylvia Massey hopefully. "Undertow" was that album that I latched onto first for Tool despite having the previously released... the first EP(!), Opiate. 

I have many fond memories of seeing this album live at Lollapalooza at Irwindale Dam in California. One of the most memorable performances I've had was Tool / Woodpussy / Laundry (featuring Tim "Herb" Alexander on drums) at the Grand Olympic Audtiorium. This was the last show that Paul D'Amour played with Tool and they had performed "No Quarter."

For this remaster, I did the usual of High-Pass filter and Low-Pass Filter while raising the gain on both stereo tracks. However, I left the original track untouched so that I could comfortably raise the gain on the additional stereo tracks. This is another one of those albums that suffered... well not really, the quiet treatment. It was mixed and mastered low, which I was able to take advantage of to remaster this beast of an album. I omitted the 10th - 68th tracks of silence. 

320 mp3s for the utmost best for this format:

http://el1011.com/tool/UndertowRemaster.320mp3.zip

V0 or Variable bitrate mp3s for slimming down on the data:

http://el1011.com/tool/UndertowRemaster.V0mp3.zip