ProgBeat: Welp, It’s Almost Official
DREAM THEATER’s Become a Laughing Stock
Straight from the horse’s mouth (Mike Portnoy’s the horse) about DT’s upcoming release: “Imagine a DREAM THEATER album with ‘A Change Of Seasons’, ‘Octavarium’, ‘Learning To Live’, ‘Pull Me Under’ and ‘The Glass Prison’… all on one album… COULD YOU HANDLE IT?? Excited? I sure am!!!!”
So there you have it. Nothing to worry about. Portnoy says that DT’s new album, Black Clouds and Silver Linings (June 23) is not only going to be good, but a collection of all your favorites. How intense.
I want to like these guys (see my April 2nd ProgBeat, “Hopefully More Silver…”). But they’re seriously making it hard. After Score–their amazing 20th Anniversary concert DVD in ‘06 that sampled their most melodic and anti-”metal” offerings–it’s like they went in a different direction. Remembering back to Score–the way they chose songs like the soft and unassuming black sheep “Vacant” from the otherwise all in-your-face Train of Thought album for the setlist–it’s feels like a farewell show to a bulk of their original fans, the ones who loved them for the finesse they mixed with their signature crazy musicianship. It’s as though in that show DT were acknowledging what it was about them that always proved that they weren‘t a “Progressive Metal” band, and played those tracks for one last time. Score feels like a final hoorah to me, some sort of last wave goodbye where only one of the parties knows that when they leave, they’re leaving forever.
After it, they signed up with Roadrunner Records and tried to make it big with Systematic Chaos, and now their 10th studio release Black Clouds and Silver Linings. But it’s not the fact that these guys are trying to make it a bit more into the mainstream that kills me; it’s not that Systematic Chaos and Black Clouds are full of tracks called “The Count of Tuscany” or “The Dark Eternal Knight;” it’s not even that they actually are slowly becoming the modern-day face of prog with this new stuff. It’s the fact that their new material is just so uninspired, so undisciplined, and even just plain boring.
The music video for their first Black Clouds single, “The Rite of Passage,” says it all. The speeding guitar solo without a hint of melody, the red monks with 300-esque bad guy masks, the faux-mood, and wasted LaBrie vocals, and can’t-take-it-seriously content, and…oh, forget it. This is what I was afraid of. DREAM THEATER isn’t what they were in the ’90s. They’re not trying anything new. They’re stuck in a rut of self-productions, with stellar individual musicians but no lyrical or compositional leaders. And if “Rite of Passage” is any indication, Black Clouds probably should be titled Systematic Chaos II.
And now I’m disheartened. It’s hard to watch a band I once loved dying like this.
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 10th, 2009 at 11:05 am and is filed under music, prog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
