“Why can’t we not be sober?
I just want to start this over.
Why can’t we drink forever?
I just want to start things over.”
 
At the beginning you are within a wooden drawer and you see the world outside only when someone (perhaps the same drawer) opens the shutter that makes you blind. You think that you can’t (or don’t want to) come out with the power of your strenght.
Where is your bottle? Don’t stop yourself. You are nothing whitout your substance intoxicating delirium.
 
It was 1993. Kurt Cobain was not dead yet, the grunge was still living with him and Tool arrived to make a step forward in the rock genre with the album ‘Undetow’ and the first single ‘Sober’. After the live action of the previous ‘Hush’, ‘Sober’ video represented the first step to personal imagination, the way that Tool will run across all their videoclips.
 
Sober’s video debuted in May 1993, directed by Fred Stuhr with the help of Tool guitarist Adam Jones, who will become, from then on, the art director and director of the following clips of the group.
Sober marks also the last appearance in a videoclip of the Tool group, that were the absolute protagonists in ‘Hush’ while in this one, they are visible only in violent, frantic but also slow-motion live-action frames that are dissolved during the videoclips: designed by Jones it comes to life with stop-motion animation that owe its birth to the work of Brothers Quay (Kurt Cobain stroke ‘Sober’, called it a rip off of the B.Q.’s works) though their works are more refined while Tool’s video is more crude.
The colours are livid and obscure to create a rotten world with soft lighting: a nightmare where nobody knows how to escape.
So the video camera seems to run accross the places like it is intoxicated.
Main character is a sort of human mole, with no eyes, that seems lost in ruined rooms, decadent corridors, where he meets sinister figures and where a wooden box keeps hiding a secret.
 
A secret that you can disclose at the end. Maybe.