The Astonishing

In the interest of full disclosure, I want to make it clear from the beginning that I have been a shameless apologist for Dream Theater for many years. I find continued enjoyment in Falling into Infinity. Conversations about this band with my friends have resembled the absolute worst forum circlejerks given physical form. Multiple Dream Theater tracks were featured in the playlist at my wedding. If there were a religion based on Images and Words, I would join it. Dream Theater's music has, in a tangible sense, changed and enriched my life.

Taking into consideration all of the above, I want it to be understood that I do not mean it lightly when I say I despise The Astonishing. In objective terms, it is not an abhorrent album. It was, ostensibly, born through considerable effort and genuine care from its creators. A true passion project. The type of project an artist might wistfully dream of one day creating, if only they had the time. Projects created without artistic passion and integrity rarely manage to produce such a visceral reaction. Nonsubstantive efforts typically amount to mediocrity. Laziness. A shrug, maybe a grunt of acknowledgment, and everyone moves on with their lives.

The Astonishing is the antithesis of an artistic effort achieved through mediocrity. It is so egregiously terrible because it was achieved through greatness allowed to run unchecked for far too long. It is the inevitable result of a band predisposed to excess and self-indulgence allowed to run rampant within their illusion of their own legendary image, with everyone around them enchanted by their spell of infallibility. As mentioned before, objectively, this is not a horrible album. It is competently performed and produced, a cohesive package, the product of a genuine artistic endeavor. Subjectively, this is one of the most revolting albums I have ever experienced.

For more than a decade now, starting roughly with 2005's Octavarium and becoming much more blatant on 2007's Systematic Chaos, Dream Theater has openly flirted with attempting to break into the world of mainstream rock recognition. Any reasonable observer would be inclined to point to the band's longstanding affiliation with Roadrunner Records as the cause - Black Clouds and Silver Linings received a full aisle-end display on its release day in 2009 at my local Best Buy in Bumfuck Nowhere, USA. This trend has seen Dream Theater - a band which once had enough self awareness to title their greatest hits album Greatest Hit in an open admission that Pull Me Under was their only song which had ever achieved anything resembling mainstream recognition - include at least one track on each subsequent album which was intended to become a marketable rock single. In broad strokes, these songs represent the nadir of Dream Theater's expansive catalog, the tracks which are always skipped on repeated listens to the albums which contain them. These songs see Dream Theater lean fully into all of their worst qualities - the copied and pasted electronic beats used by every djent band, constant crooning and soaring lead vocals contrasted with spoken backing vocals, power chords punctuated with wankery, and an utter inability to know when to stop - in a vain and nakedly brazen pursuit of revenue.

The Astonishing is the result of a band which has reduced its repertoire to include only the aforementioned elements thinking that it has a concept that rivals the The Wall in its staggering greatness and everyone around them believing them in spite of years of evidence to the contrary. There is not a single moment on this album which an intellectually honest person would attempt to argue qualifies as metal. Despite its glaringly bloated running time, at no point on this album does the band perform anything that would have been considered a riff prior to the proliferation of alternative rock and “metal” bands in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The notion that this is the same band which recorded Images and Words and Awake is a travesty.

The common characterization of The Astonishing is that it is a rock opera. Roughly, it is 2112 meets Les Miserables. If you find that notion repugnant, move along. This is not the band for you, but you already knew that and you're reading this because you enjoy seeing the casual evisceration of what amounts to the turgid distillation of the essence of everything you detest about this band and its cult of followers. If you're enticed by the concept of Dream Theater playing up the theater aspect of their name, I have bad news for you. This album isn't winning a Tony Award.

The Astonishing goes beyond the paltry distinction of being a mere concept album. In essence, it is an audio play, a musical with no stage production and one man voicing all of the characters. As I mentioned before about being an apologist for this band, I want to again make it clear that I am a fan of James LaBrie. His attempt to voice all of this album's characters is one of its weakest points, one of the many reasons that it becomes such an unbearably overwrought listen so quickly. LaBrie has employed multiple voices in the past, most notably for Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory, in which he does an effective job of differentiating the blithe, innocent Victoria from the other characters in the narrative and thus makes her naivete about the danger she is in that much more crushing when she is murdered. For The Astonishing, LaBrie's voices convey little emotion beyond “I'm the hero,” “I'm evil,” and “I'm a girl.” I think this is partially because his range has noticeably decreased over the years, but I think the more significant problem is the unnecessary number of characters in the cast.

Let's talk about the cast for a minute. There are so many characters. I'll be damned if I can ever remember anyone beyond Designated Hero Protagonist Guy, Faythe, and Lord Nefaryus. I want everyone to know that typing those names caused me physical pain. The characters and the narrative in which they exist are the most excruciating aspect of the album. At the heart of the matter, the reason why this album offends me so profoundly is this: How is it possible that a band which has created so much intricate music somehow spent years crafting and refining a story that, were it not being performed by Dream Theater, I would assume was lifted directly from an edgy high school student's notebook? It is truly uncanny the degree to which the narrative evokes the image of its author being a fifteen year-old who scribbled it in the margins of their algebra notebook and later shared it with their friends at the lunch table in a desperate bid to attempt to appear deep and mature. In my mind's eye, Faythe & Co. dress in clothes purchased from Hot Topic. Lord Nefaryus, being the cartoon villain he is, is Jafar from Disney's Aladdin. Hero Protagonist Guy is that one theater kid you knew in high school who thought he had real talent and was going to make the bigtime but instead burned out before the age of 20 and became the resident fedora tipper taking six years to finish a two-year program at your local community college. Together, the ragtag band of heroes teach the bad guy the true meaning of music and save America, or something equally as cloying and contrived. I find it impossible to care at all about any of the characters, and therein lies the failure of the narrative. There is no pathos.

The most common criticism of this album is that it contains very little actual musical content. Much like the criticisms levied at the narrative, they are well-founded. Randomly selecting a point in time in this album and pressing play is statistically more likely than not to land you on a piano-and-vocals interlude. Interlude is a misnomer, though, because when such aimless passages constitute the majority of an album's running time, they are no longer interludes. They are the content itself. This might have been a much more charming album if the narrative had taken a backseat to the music and the whole ordeal lasted around 45 minutes, but instead this album is the poster child of why double albums are, with very few exceptions, a terrible idea - the band rarely has enough content to fill two discs. Dream Theater certainly did not, and yet, therein lies the greatest paradox of this album. It is incredibly vacuous and starved for content, yet I would laugh at the idea that anything whatsoever was cut from it. I've never encountered another album that demands so much from the listener in exchange for so little in return. Disc two suffers from this in particular. Think the listener might be starved to hear some electric guitar or, god forbid, some actual drums? Time for another pointless minute of electronic noise. That will surely immerse them. We're in the future, you see.

To circle back to where we began, I want to emphasize that The Astonishing is not a product of laziness. It is not a cynical cash grab. It is as intricately crafted as anything Dream Theater has ever released, perhaps their most ambitious project to date. That's what I find so incomprehensible about it. How is it possible that a group of ostensibly responsible people all sat down in a room together, discussed this, and decided it was acceptable? It boggles my mind. How is it possible that seemingly nobody involved in the creative process spoke up and noted that perhaps this was too much of a departure from expectations even for a progressive metal band? The band was clearly surrounded by an army of yes-men. Everyone involved, including the band themselves, appears to have been convinced that everything the band touches turns to gold. That should have been plainly and demonstrably false after the events of the last fifteen or so years, but I wouldn't be here yelling into the void if that had been recognized somewhere along the way. Dream Theater's fans are commonly and correctly cited to be impossible to please, but this album is so far off-course that there was never any hope of it pleasing anyone but the artists themselves. That particular nugget of truth is why I argue that this album possesses genuine artistic integrity, but unfortunately, artistic integrity alone does not make a good album. Vision alone does not make one a genius, and change for change's sake does not equate to progress. This album was a legitimate undertaking from conception to release, created by people with decades of experience, and is an artistic failure on every level.

So why then do I give this album a score higher than zero percent? Because I am a brainwashed, card-carrying, certified member of this band's cult, and dammit, Our New World is a pretty enjoyable song. I can't help myself. Fuck this album, fuck everything that led to its creation, and most of all fuck me.