It’s been a year since one of my favorite bands Dream Theater released their most recent album ‘The Astonishing’. A new Dream Theater album is something that I wait patiently for every 24 to 30 months. I look forward to it greatly. When I first heard that they were doing a double album I thought it was an appropriate move to up their game. Then I heard it was a concept album and I thought, ‘all right I’ll give it chance, it’s not even out after all.’ Then I heard it was going to be a concept album about some dystopic future where everything is run by machines and I thought ‘that’s no remotely original’ and I started to worry. Then I heard the first single and became very worried. My favorite band was going in a direction that I had feared they would since Mike Portnoy left the band in 2010, despite John Petrucci claiming he preferred the heavier side of the band. They were beginning to lose their heavy metal credentials. Then the album ‘The Astonishing’ was released and I sampled it. I was so disappointed that it’s taken me this past 12 months to sit down and talk about it.
It’s fucking Disney Dream Theater!! Just horrible! It’s a two hour ballad with trumpet fanfares featuring lame ass characters in a lame ass setting. In fact, forget about my subjective opinion as a Dream Theater fan. Let’s look at the album objectively. It goes nowhere and it’s lazy. And I don’t mean that as a generality. It really goes nowhere and the songs are pretty much all half-assed. The album self repeats itself with the same modulations, chord progressions and interludes for two whole hours!! It’s like an Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, but not as cool. That’s right, something Dream Theater did is less cool than Andrew fucking Lloyd Weber. Which segways us to the concept of the record. Completely unoriginal. A dystopian like future with robots and a corporation running things? Gee, that’s only been done about…I can’t even count that high (2112 anybody?). The album has essentially two moments of quality Dream Theater: ‘The Gift of Music’ and ‘Moment of Betrayal’. Both are decent songs that would be fine on a disc of Dream Theater music along with the many other flavors they offer. However, this is just a one flavor album. And unfortunately it’s their least tasty flavor. The sample below, the awful ‘Lord Nafaryus’, captures the main flavor of this album. Here’s hoping that the ‘Images and Words 25’ tour will get them back on track. Please Dream Theater, do another ‘Train of Thought’. Hell, I’d even settle for another ‘Octavarium’ style album. Just anything but this.
Imagine listening to this song for essentially two hours.
