Taking DT for Granted

[Metropolis Pt. II]

Let me preface this by saying that I've been a DT fan since 2004. Just so you know where I'm coming from.

Everything I'm about to say was inspired by this cover of OTBOA: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6LxYIwZ_uA&feature=player_embedded#at=543

It's basically a flawless rendition of the song, and it sounds gorgeous. As I was watching it, what I realized is that this is a really, really excellent song. Watching these other guys play it made me appreciate the complexities and the sheer grandeur of the song. The intro has so much beauty as it builds up and the melody fits very well within the context of the music. The instrumental section is stellar and brilliantly constructed with taste. The outro has a lot of power and it's an exciting way to end. This is simply an outstanding song!

The reason why I was able to appreciate OTBOA after seeing the video was because I pretended that these guys were the ones who wrote it. I've never heard of these guys before, so as I pretended that it was their song, I was blown away by the surprise of it being so darn good. When I first heard OTBOA upon it's streaming release on Youtube, it was underwhelming because of it's relatively straightforward feel. I was a bit disappointed, honestly. I only understood its awesomeness after seeing this video.

So after watching this video, I realized that I have taken DT for granted in a sense. I've built up this huge expectation for them to crank out beastly material each and every time an album comes out. What I now understand is that the tracks I typically perceive as "weak" or "meh" would actually be incredible songs if they were released by either a new band or an amateur band. It's all about perspective. I've decided to look at A Dramatic Turn of Events as a debut album being released by a new band called Dream Theater. It may sound odd, but it makes me more excited to hear what this will sound like. Can anyone else relate to any of this?

[Blackfield]

So you need another band to interpret a DT song before appreciating it? That's not very flattering towards DT

[ReaPsTA]

So you need another band to interpret a DT song before appreciating it? That's not very flattering towards DT

I feel like you totally missed the point of Met's post, which I thought was pretty good.

[Elaitch]

Indeed. I listened my way through three Evergrey albums just today at work, and during that run I realized that their "dark progressive metal" is quite simple compared to most of DT's work (I squeezed in OTBOA in between two albums). For example, when I in my mind compared some of the guitar solos on their albums to some of DT's I could think of, I suddenly realized I actually do take JP's skill on the guitar much for granted, and DT's songs in general nowadays. Also, recently, I had a similar experience like the one you had; I didn't really appreciate JP's guitar work on the Bridges in the Sky teaser until I saw a guy cover it, because then I could see how it was actually played, and well, it's not exactly an example of your average riffing.

Also, I think the thing is that if one is a keen listener to DT, one tends to over time start mostly comparing recent DT to themselves (older material), and well, that's some pretty intense competition, I'd say

[lordxizor]

They do make things look much easier than they actually are. It is very easy to forget how amazingly talented everyone in the band is.

[bosk1]

Metropolis Pt. II, I totally get what you are saying, and I agree.  DT, both as individual musicians and as a band, have set such high standards and are so known for their complexity that it is easy to take what they are doing for granted.  Reminds me a lot of an article I read about John Petrucci's playing awhile back that pretty much says the same thing.  Excerpt quoted here:

John does everything at an extremely high level. Watch John's Rock Discipline instructional video at your own peril — he'll make you want to throw out your guitar and become an insurance salesman. His alternate picking is in the top echelon of players of any genre. 16th note runs are precise and articulate at tempos over 200 bpm. He's also mastered legato technique — again, perfectly in time and articulate at all tempos. Frequently, legato passages that sound like two-handed taps are actually done with just his left hand, at insane speeds. He is also ridiculously well versed in chord theory and has full command of harmony, arranging, and orchestration.

...

This is a personal preference thing, and I'm sure Petrucci's many fans would disagree, but John's technique is so developed, that it virtually eliminates any sense of drama in his lead style. The amazing stuff he plays in the context of Dream Theater looks completely effortless for him. So what — right?

Well, contrast Petrucci, for example, with Gary Moore during his rock metal days. With Gary, you can feel him battling the guitar to make it do what he wants — he's on the edge of losing control, trying to get a feeling across. There's drama in that. Conversely, Petrucci makes everything sound too easy. Guitars are John's bitch — he completely dominates them. You know he's gonna be flawless. It's like the differences between WWII and Granada — one was an epic conflict, the other was like swatting a gnat. Which would you rather see a movie about?

Full article here:  https://www.dinosaurrockguitar.com/new/node/45

[ReaPsTA]

Another thing worth nothing about JP (44), JR (54), and MM (48), even though they're in the latter half of their musical lives, they all relentlessly work to add new musical capabilities to their repertoire.  While Myung and LaBrie haven't quite expanded their bag of tricks like the other three, they still practice and refine their technique just as relentlessly.

[TAC]

It's funny that article cited Gary Moore, because I hear a ton of Gary Moore's influence in JP solos.

Also to the OP, this is what makes DT one of the best live bands I've ever seen. They play everything they've recorded and pull it off beautifully.

[Odysseus]

I pretty much agree with the OP.  Having been listening to DT since I discovered Awake in 94-95, I think my expectations have risen considerably.  Yeah, I can still rock out to simpler stuff, but I guess I like to be 'challenged' a bit more as a result of listening to DT, if 'challenged' is the appropriate word.... I'm stuck for an alternative at the moment lol

[MetropolisxPt1]

The best way to go into an album is with no expectations and patience.

[Ben_Jamin]

@OP: That happens to a lot of bands. Certain bands have this feel/sound, and then decide to stray from it a bit and then people get upset because of that reason.

[obscure]

Maybe it's the beauty of not being a professional, I don't know... but I tend to love whatever they produce, play, cover....
and I usually get mysely into a fight when people show signals of taking them for granted... and I get annoyed when people compare their recent material to the older ones as Elaitch pointed out...
Let alone taking them for granted, I almost pray for their health....
That's why I loved this thread....

[olliemedsy]

i get exactly what you mean. some people really dislike SC and BCASL, but compare it to most of the other current music out today, and it makes it so much better. we are so used to dream theater being so good, we always expect the best from them. if the white stripes wrote OTBOA and it sounded exactly the same, it would probably seem better than dream theater writing

[Liberation]

This is also why I'm very careful at dismissing music in general as "bad" or "worthless" or whatever... I realise that even if it sounds like crap to me, it probably took the band a lot of effort to write and record it anyway, and while they obviously did take into account that not everyone will like it, they didn't deserve for their work to be called "shit" or something like that.

It truly takes a horrible, made with minimum effort pile of crap that got massive popularity due to promotion anyway (I won't throw any names or whatever here since I don't want offtopic or controversy) for me to be merciless about it. But if it's music that maybe even sounds awful to me, but I feel that the band put effort into it, I won't just fully bash it and won't go further than "I don't like it" in different versions.

And with bands I really like... well, I admit it's beyond my comprehension how someone can consider himself a fan of a band and call something they made "shit". If you like it, it's awesome, but if they leave your comfort zone they become shit? Quite childish in my opinion.

[2Timer]

I guess it all comes down to what you expect from DT. 15 years ago, for me, a new DT release better have insanely fast guitar/keyboard/bass unisons and tons of high, operatic vocals. They blew me away when I first heard them in '91, continued to blow me away and impress me with their playing until TOT. After that, something changed for me with the band. I don't love them any less, but they have nothing to prove to me anymore. I know they can all play a million miles an hour and JLB can sing like a son of a bitch. Now it's all about the songwriting for me. When I go back and revisit things like Voices, I look past the killer guitar solos and everything and realize how great the songwriting is.
So I get what the OP is saying about being underwhelmed when something they do sounds 'simple', but maybe the band is realizing, too, that they've pretty much done everything they can do musically and now they're just focusing on writing simply cool songs. They've definitely gotten better at making things catchy. I'm at the point where catchy is where it's at.
So yeah, I think I had taken them for granted at some point, but I do fully appreciate what they do.

[Riceball]

...Guitars are John's bitch...

I lol'd

[The Silent Cody]

Well Metropolis, interesting point of view. I don't know if I can take a look on DT as a new band for all these years I've been Their fan (since 1998), I'm waiting for new album so much that I don't need any other boosters to enjoy it fully

[obscure]

I guess it all comes down to what you expect from DT.

absolutely.... couple of my friends who expected DT to do the stuff they did 15 years ago have ditched the band over the years....
I am happy to evolve along with the band.....

[champbassist]

What's funny is that thoughts such as the OP's are always in the back of my mind whenever I listen to DT songs. I might listen to a DT song and, initially, go 'I don't like that all that much', but the next thought that pops into my mind is, 'It's still pretty awesome talent wise'

Full article here:  https://www.dinosaurrockguitar.com/new/node/45

A good article overall, but there's one statement that makes me question the DT knowledge/understanding of the person who wrote it:

bassist John Myung plays bass like a frustrated guitarist

Even if someone takes a totally neutral, non-bassist or even DT-hating perspective, he/she would surely agree that this is an utterly ignorant thing to say about John Myung's playing. JM often inhabits the absolute low end, rarely coming up, especially on post SFAM albums. Also, if a bassist is labeled a "frustrated guitar player" it implies that he either overplays or wrestles with the guitar or keys for sonic space, in a frustrated effort to attain the up-front characteristics (mix-wise) of a guitar/keys.

Sounds to me like the writer knows about John Petrucci a fair deal, but doesn't know nearly as much about the rest of the band and tries to make up cons for the sake of it.

[rumborak]

yuk, double post again.

[rumborak]

Dunno, I somewhat see the point of the article. I for one have never understood the occasionally excessive love for JM the is on display here, and many time I've kinda written it off as people rooting for the underdog of the band.
There's no question JM is one of the most technically advanced players out there. But, he *is* playing a lot of melodic lines (which is usually the task of the guitar) or just doubled whatever JP was doing, and he got mangled sonically for essentially 3 consecutive albums.
So, maybe worded a bit acrimoniously, but I can see where both the "guitarist" and the "frustrated" come from.

rumborak

[bosk1]

What's funny is that thoughts such as the OP's are always in the back of my mind whenever I listen to DT songs. I might listen to a DT song and, initially, go 'I don't like that all that much', but the next thought that pops into my mind is, 'It's still pretty awesome talent wise'

Full article here:  https://www.dinosaurrockguitar.com/new/node/45

A good article overall, but there's one statement that makes me question the DT knowledge/understanding of the person who wrote it:

bassist John Myung plays bass like a frustrated guitarist

Oh, I know.  There are other things in the article that are off-base as well.  But I found the overall point of JP being so good you can just get numb to how good he is to be pretty on point, so I was merely referring to the article for that.

[bosk1]

There's no question JM is one of the most technically advanced players out there. But, he *is* playing a lot of melodic lines (which is usually the task of the guitar) or just doubled whatever JP was doing, and he got mangled sonically for essentially 3 consecutive albums.
So, maybe worded a bit acrimoniously, but I can see where both the "guitarist" and the "frustrated" come from.

rumborak

But one thing to keep in mind that may not have been clear is that that article was written around 2000 or so, so it does not take into account anything after Scenes, and I don't think there is really any "mangling" of JM's sound going on at that point in time.

[rumborak]

Most likely the author threw it in there because of JM's melody playing, which can be interpreted as deserting the role of a bass. It's actually a fairly common accusation towards bassist because sadly (but in no way insinuating that this is the case with JM), quite a few guitarists end up being bassists when they realize they can't play solos etc. And even though they are bassists, they still play it like a guitar.

BTW, hadn't heard the "Portnoy Complaint" in quite a while Totally forgot about it. Actually, would have been hilarious if DT's inspiration corner had featured a big stack of books, and somewhere in there would have been "Portnoy's Complaint".

rumborak

[emtee]

In addition to taking them for granted it's also easy to forget that they really have tried to shake things up from
album to album (for the most part anyways) and even though some of us may not connect as well with some albums,
at least they always tried to cover some new ground. I respect the hell out of that. With a collection that spans
into the thousands, I have a lot of total discographies that pretty much mirror each other.

[Orbert]

Since I grew up in the 70's, I'd heard of "Portnoy's Complaint" quite a bit, as it was quite a controversial book at the time.  Last fall, the phrase kept popping into my head as I read various things by and about Mike Portnoy.  After a while, I stopped chuckling to myself every time.  But it was a while, a long while.

I don't see how "playing the bass like a guitar" is necessarily a bad thing.  Some of my favorite bass players are all over the bottom end, adding motion and tension and definitely doing much more than just thumping the root and the five.  I guess when it actually gets to the point where they're playing countermelodies and counterpoints down there, you could compare what they're doing to what a guitarist does, but I still don't see how that's a bad thing if it's down with taste and restraint, which JM certainly has.

As for taking DT for granted, I completely agree with the original post.  Back in the 80's, Rush started making a lot of music I really didn't care for, and in frustration, I referred to some of it as total shit.  I told my friends that there was nothing going on, it was practically an insult to their talent that they were putting out this boring, by-the-numbers crap.  They said "Are you kidding?  Listen to what they're doing.  Now imagine us in the garage creating music like this."  Ouch.  They were right.  It really put it all into perspective.  You get used to super-talented bands putting out masterpiece after masterpiece, and sometimes forget that the simplest stuff or the crappiest song they've ever done is still better than what most of us will ever create (which is rather annoying actually).

[DetonationSequence]

Having read through several of those Dinosaur profiles, there's a lot of valid points (though some of them quite subjective) raised about the guitarists themselves; however, I can't agree with a lot of the writer's thoughts on music in general and non-guitarist band members. Also, whoever writes these has a disturbing obssession with axemen having 'sex' in their playing and raising a 'tent in [his] pants'. Those were the exact words used in every single one I read, whether it was Chris DeGarmo or Steve Vai. Not exactly criteria a normal person would judge a guitarist by in any unironic sense.

Regarding the thread's actual topic, I definitely agree. Even taking a DT album I'd consider to have its weaknesses, like FII or TOT, and comparing it to the majority of other albums I listen to, it'll always come out way on top. That said, I'm not exactly in the jaded, Moore-hungry 'only old DT is great' camp; I generally love everything they do.

[iamtheeviltwin]

In addition to taking them for granted it's also easy to forget that they really have tried to shake things up from
album to album (for the most part anyways) and even though some of us may not connect as well with some albums,
at least they always tried to cover some new ground. I respect the hell out of that. With a collection that spans
into the thousands, I have a lot of total discographies that pretty much mirror each other.

This is important to me as well and one of the things I love about DT.  That each album has it's own feel and that no two albums are alike.  Even if you feel that they became "stale" or "formulaic" on the last several albums, you would be hard pressed to deny that 8VM, SC, and BC&SL all have a feel, sound, and songwriting that is different from each other.

As much as I love bands like Megadeth and Motorhead  I can pick up their newer albums and aside from some production issues could mix and match their discography without blinking an eye.

[jackbauer114]

Ever since i started writing music with my band, and realizing how much work it is to create music, the way i evaluate music now is this: I ask myself, "If i created this, would i be proud of it?". And the answer with literally ALL of DT's catalog is a resounding YES. lol. They are all complete professionals.

[cramx3]

For me, all I need to do is spend significant time listening to other bands besides DT and then come back to DT and I always feel like I take them for granted.  I think its just from being a hardcore fan for an extended period of time.

[champbassist]

I don't see how "playing the bass like a guitar" is necessarily a bad thing.  

Playing bass like a guitar is not a bad thing, but saying that a bassist's playing resembles that of a 'frustrated guitarist' is a common slur in the bass community. It implies that you originally wanted to play the guitar but you 'had to' choose bass and you try your guitarist antics on the bass, and, in the process, do not play the role that a bassist, for the sonic well-being of the song, should play.

But one thing to keep in mind that may not have been clear is that that article was written around 2000 or so, so it does not take into account anything after Scenes, and I don't think there is really any "mangling" of JM's sound going on at that point in time.

Admittedly, I missed the date there. It's just my perception that he's been in the "low-down-firmly-bassist" more often after SFAM. Even so, I don't think you can call JM's playing prior to SFAM as sounding like a frustrated guitarist. To clear my point further, regarding my perception of a bassist who sounds like a frustrated guitarist, I'd say Joey DeMaio falls in that category. Not to say I don't like what he does, but if someone said he sounded like that (a frustrated guitarist) I'd not disagree.

[Dream Team]

If the only CD from DT you ever heard was WDADU, you might say that about JM but nothing else after that applies. The writers of that site definitely have a bias toward stuff where the bass player holds down a good bottom-end groove so that the guitat player can play "sexy" stuff over the top in 4/4. You can see why Jimmy Page would rate highly there. Also, their preferences also lean heavily towards bluesy players which is why Gary Moore and John Sykes are their favorites.

[obscure]

In addition to taking them for granted it's also easy to forget that they really have tried to shake things up from
album to album (for the most part anyways) and even though some of us may not connect as well with some albums,
at least they always tried to cover some new ground. I respect the hell out of that. With a collection that spans
into the thousands, I have a lot of total discographies that pretty much mirror each other.

Well put!

In addition to taking them for granted it's also easy to forget that they really have tried to shake things up from
album to album (for the most part anyways) and even though some of us may not connect as well with some albums,
at least they always tried to cover some new ground. I respect the hell out of that. With a collection that spans
into the thousands, I have a lot of total discographies that pretty much mirror each other.

As much as I love bands like Megadeth and Motorhead  I can pick up their newer albums and aside from some production issues could mix and match their discography without blinking an eye.

can't agree with this one though.... I mean the "Megadeth" part....

[Sketchy]

Yar, I have to admit I got a little bugged by the "JM plays like a frustrated guitarrist" and also by the "Sappy ballads" thing. The fact that they have songs like LSOAD and Anna Lee is one of the main things I love about DT. They do the heavy and then they do the beautiful, and it just makes both elements sound even better due to the contrast. Yes, Anna Lee is one of my favourite things DT has done. I just love it.

And on the thing complaining you can't bang your head in 7/8, I claim blasphemy. I'd advise they try harder.

[Orbert]

You can definitely bang your head in 7/8.  As a bonus, the bruises form an asymmetrical pattern.  It's pretty cool.