The Astonishing

Dream Theater’s most ambitious and conceptual albums have tended to be my favorites from them – Metropolis Part 2, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, and Octavarium. It’s been a while since they have attempted a project of such a caliber as The Astonishing; their last two if not four albums essentially have seen the band going on autopilot, producing some of their most uninspired, standard, paint-by-the-numbers “progressive,” material. The Astonishing dethrones all of the newer-era and even the bold mid-era works in terms of its elaborate concept and massive 130 minute runtime, but unfortunately it does not nearly dethrone them in terms of quality. The songwriting unoriginal and unintriguing, and the concept poorly executed and cliché, while not entirely bad, it nevertheless falls woefully short.

Musically speaking, this is far different than most Dream Theater releases, something made obvious by the sheer amount of songs and their short runtimes, each individually averaging below four minutes. (!?) The instrumental wankery that has until now been a staple of Dream Theater has been massively cut down upon, which could definitely be interpreted as a good thing (it would seem that they finally figured out that they have nothing left to prove). At least if interesting songwriting has been compromised for storytelling, we don’t have to hear Petrucci or Rudess play a thousand notes in one second, as they are wont to do on most DT recordings. Myung is again inaudible and the drums aren’t particularly interesting, blending into the background and not doing any more than they need to.

There are very few moments from The Astonishing that could be called metal; most of it is cheesy balladry with a few prog rock songs thrown into the mix, plenty tending to lie somewhere in between two categories. The prog rock songs aren’t bad but don’t really do anything new for DT, though the more typical rock/metal-leaning songs still end up sticking out more. A New Beginning is the most reminiscent of a typical Dream Theater epic, and the quiet part at five minutes in is truly the only little musical fluctuation that pops out during the entire album. Brother Can You Hear Me is not typical DT, instead an immense, grand anthem or a chant, and it sounds like something that warriors in the middle ages would sing to prepare themselves for battle. Its reprise in the final/title track gave me the chills the first time through and it was a powerful conclusion to the album even though I found the characters and plot to be lacking.

The NOMAC (noise machine) tracks, each short interlude placed throughout the album, really aren’t necessary, would perhaps be nice if they were used to break up longer songs, if those existed on The Astonishing. Fortunately these seem to take the place of unnecessary samples, of which there are few. Dream Theater also took the liberty of adding in the symphonic and choral elements that have been on their albums as of late. There are yet more additions: a horn section, and bagpipes. Yes, bagpipes. On the X Aspect. On a more positive note, I like the horns a lot; normally they hang in the background, but on Three Days they take the forefront briefly and gloriously unexpectedly.

If you haven’t been acquainted with the background information of The Astonishing, such as its characters and the premise behind it, before listening I would recommend you do so. This is an album that demands the listener’s full attention, and it is easy to miss something in the plot or not realize which character is singing if one happens to lose concentration for even a short time. LaBrie supposedly tries to sing in a different voice for each character, a feature that I am not really catching on to. It might be easier to understand who is narrating if he had taken an Ayreon-style approach and brought in a different singer for each character. People also say that his voice has improved since last album, but I don’t hear this either – he sounds the same as ever, below average but still listenable.

The plot itself is generic. No two ways about it. Borrowing heavily from Rush’s 2112 about the freedom of music, the rest of its concept is your typical young adult dystopian sci-fi, with perhaps a hint of fantasy. The idea of a future oppressive government has been used time and time again throughout sci-fi’s history, from Orwell’s classic 1984 to the The Hunger Games. On top of that we have “the chosen one” and straight people who enjoy the cliché of (forbidden) love at first sight. If you’re not sold on how bad this is, read the plot description from When Your Time Has Come from the official Dream Theater website:

“Like a lightning bolt from the heavens and without hesitation, they immediately know that they are meant to be together and that this encounter was no accident.”

If this isn’t the cheesiest thing you’ve ever read then I don’t know what to tell you, but thankfully these aren’t actual lyrics. Like many concept albums, The Astonishing runs the risk of being incredibly tacky, which it does indeed, and this is merely one of its offenses. The worst part of the plot besides the love story has to be how the conflict is resolved. I’m not going to ruin it for you but it involves the power of music so just use your imagination for this one.

The Astonishing isn’t doing anything new from a compositional standpoint, and the actual narrative and concept are weak and unoriginal as well. But because it’s so different from anything else that Dream Theater has done, it is difficult to assign it a numerical value. The band has tried really hard to make themselves inaccessible, not in terms of sound, but with sheer album length and their intense focus on a storyline. Ultimately it comes down to one’s personal feelings about many short songs, concept albums, and a whole lot of ballads. The Astonishing has some solid tracks on it, but in general the writing is boring and does not do anything interesting, though the lyrics at least keep things mildly entertaining. If no one’s got the time for music anymore, then they sure don’t have time for this two-hour overblown concept album.