Your Controversial Opinions on DT

[The Presence of Frenemies]

I don't agree that WDADU gels better than more recent songs.

The album as a whole doesn't cohere better, but there are certainly spots/songs that gel better than some of the lower lights on recent albums. The worst song (and worst-written song) by DT since 2007 is worse (and worse-written) than the best song on WDADU.

the sections are long enough that a transition here or there doesn't affect the flow that much at all

I think this is also the root of some of this disagreement. The way I see it, the excessive length of these pasted-in sections actually hurts the flow of the song. When it inevitably returns to its original groove for a final verse or chorus, you have that "Oh...yeah...I remember how the song went like this five minutes ago" moment, where you have to quickly re-orient yourself back to where the song was before the instrumental section--see Outcry for a particularly egregious example. Whereas with WDADU, yeah the band was kind of all over the place, but that kind of keeps you alert when you listen to it. The band doesn't settle into a groove for four minutes and then pull the rug out from under you for no apparent reason. That doesn't mean it's fantastically written or anything, but once I heard the better WDADU songs a few times I just got used to the arrangements. On the other hand, the lesser songs from WDADU, and from all eras of DT really (including songs like AROP and TDEN), will always have sections that make me go "Why is this here?"

[BlobVanDam]

I don't agree that WDADU gels better than more recent songs.

The album as a whole doesn't cohere better, but there are certainly spots/songs that gel better than some of the lower lights on recent albums. The worst song (and worst-written song) by DT since 2007 is worse (and worse-written) than the best song on WDADU.

the sections are long enough that a transition here or there doesn't affect the flow that much at all

I think this is also the root of some of this disagreement. The way I see it, the excessive length of these pasted-in sections actually hurts the flow of the song. When it inevitably returns to its original groove for a final verse or chorus, you have that "Oh...yeah...I remember how the song went like this five minutes ago" moment, where you have to quickly re-orient yourself back to where the song was before the instrumental section--see Outcry for a particularly egregious example. Whereas with WDADU, yeah the band was kind of all over the place, but that kind of keeps you alert when you listen to it. The band doesn't settle into a groove for four minutes and then pull the rug out from under you for no apparent reason. That doesn't mean it's fantastically written or anything, but once I heard the better WDADU songs a few times I just got used to the arrangements. On the other hand, the lesser songs from WDADU, and from all eras of DT really (including songs like AROP and TDEN), will always have sections that make me go "Why is this here?"

I think that must be the root of the disagreement, because I don't agree with that reasoning. But it's prog, so there's no "right" or "wrong" approach to it, I guess it's just what works for the individual. I'd rather a song have a few larger sections, than have dozens of tiny sections that don't give me a feel for what the song is trying to do, which is why I really don't think much of a song like ACOS.

[Jaffa]

Well, it's all opinion, of course, but the way I see it, if you have 'dozens of tiny sections' that feel very different from each other, the whole song just feels chaotic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  But if you have a few larger sections that feel very different from each other, it doesn't feel simply 'chaotic' to me, it just feels like it's at odds with itself, spending five minutes building in one direction only to spend three minutes moving in a completely different direction, only to jump back to the original direction.

[BlobVanDam]

Well, it's all opinion, of course, but the way I see it, if you have 'dozens of tiny sections' that feel very different from each other, the whole song just feels chaotic, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  But if you have a few larger sections that feel very different from each other, it doesn't feel simply 'chaotic' to me, it just feels like it's at odds with itself, spending five minutes building in one direction only to spend three minutes moving in a completely different direction, only to jump back to the original direction.

To me a song with lots of little sections is like a modern day fight sequence in a movie where it switches around so quickly you can't get your bearings and tell what's going on, and it's just a mess.
But with longer sections, it's like different scenes in a movie. They can be totally different, but they're all cohesive within themselves, and you can see how they all fit together to form the larger whole. I don't get that sense when the song doesn't settle on anything long enough for me to get any emotional response from it, and develop a musical idea fully before moving on to a new section.

[Jaffa]

Well, see, to me, when a song doesn't settle on anything long enough for me to get a musical response from it, that tells me that chaos is the whole point.  Like, you've talked about Metropolis before as an example of a song with crazy jarring transitions, but to me, Metropolis is a song about crazy jarring transitions.  The first time I heard that song I thought it was completely batshit insane.  Luckily it was intriguing enough to make me listen again, and by the fourth or fifth listen I was acclimated to the chaos of it, and nowadays I adore every chaotic moment of it.

It's sort of like spinning around in circles.  Sometimes, spinning around in circles can be very fun.  But if your goal is to get somewhere, then spinning around in circles is just a meaningless waste of time. 

So to me, a song with lots of crazy tiny sections is like spinning around in circles for the fun of it, whereas a cohesive song with one large crazy section pasted in the middle of it feels more like trying to get from point A to point B and randomly stopping to spin in circles on the way there. 

[BlobVanDam]

Reading that post makes me dizzier than spinning in circles would have.

In Metropolis it works, because I do feel like chaos is the point (as I feel it is in TDEN, and I think it works perfectly there too), but on WDADU, it just feels ingrained in the songwiting style regardless of whether it fits the song. Unless the whole album is supposed to be chaos, I don't get the feeling it was supposed to sound like the mess that it is.

[The Presence of Frenemies]

To me a song with lots of little sections is like a modern day fight sequence in a movie where it switches around so quickly you can't get your bearings and tell what's going on, and it's just a mess.
But with longer sections, it's like different scenes in a movie. They can be totally different, but they're all cohesive within themselves, and you can see how they all fit together to form the larger whole. I don't get that sense when the song doesn't settle on anything long enough for me to get any emotional response from it, and develop a musical idea fully before moving on to a new section.

Where this kind of breaks down for me is when the split is, as it often is with DT, vocal-instrumental-vocal. The 'different scenes' thing works (for me; obviously I'm being subjective) if it's all instrumental or all vocal-based, but there's just something incongruous about having an instrumental section that doesn't go with the lyrics and/or the music put around them. That makes it like scenes from different movies, not one movie, to me. So I can handle even the madness of instrumentals like TDOE or YJ, or all the vocal twists of The Killing Hand, because they're always communicating on the same wavelength despite the turns, but I get annoyed with something like the AROP middle section.

Of course, part of my distaste for that AROP section, the TDEN middle, or The Reckoning is that the music in those sections sounds very tossed-off and the riffs aren't compelling, but that's another totally subjective arena not really worth diving into IMO. I think the style can work, but I much prefer its use on, say, Peruvian Skies--the section transitions smoothly into the guitar solo and then has cool riffs from there, and it also works its way back to the vocals without any real difficulty.

But hey, just my opinion. DT certainly can be enjoyed in all sorts of different ways and by people with all sorts of different tastes (and micro-tastes).

[BlobVanDam]

This always beings me to the question of how Metropolis' instrumental section fits the song any better than any modern DT song. It's just a random, shreddy, chaotic section with a 200bpm carnival solo in the middle. How does that fit the rest of the song and the lyrics? It doesn't. And the transition into the instrumental section isn't exactly smooth either.
Granted, it's an awesome instrumental section, but the point is this isn't something exclusive to modern DT.

[Jaffa]

Reading that post makes me dizzier than spinning in circles would have.

Admittedly it got away from me a bit.  For whatever it's worth, what I posted was the most sensible of several attempts.    

In Metropolis it works, because I do feel like chaos is the point (as I feel it is in TDEN, and I think it works perfectly there too), but on WDADU, it just feels ingrained in the songwiting style regardless of whether it fits the song. Unless the whole album is supposed to be chaos, I don't get the feeling it was supposed to sound like the mess that it is.

Well, of course in the end it's all going to come down to opinions.  I didn't really mean to be defending WDADU, only addressing the issue of 'lots of tiny sections' vs. 'a few larger sections'. 

When it comes to WDADU specifically... I would say that while some songs on SC and BC&SL feel like they're going somewhere and getting lost along the way, some songs on WDADU feel like they have no idea where they're going in the first place. 

[The Presence of Frenemies]

This always beings me to the question of how Metropolis' instrumental section fits the song any better than any modern DT song. It's just a random, shreddy, chaotic section with a 200bpm carnival solo in the middle. How does that fit the rest of the song and the lyrics? It doesn't. And the transition into the instrumental section isn't exactly smooth either.
Granted, it's an awesome instrumental section, but the point is this isn't something exclusive to modern DT.

Yeah, this gets at what I was saying in the second paragraph of my last post. And for the record, I agree with this viewpoint. But there's just some spark behind those I&W sections that isn't always there with the modern stuff. It doesn't sound tossed-off. It does sound oddly placed, but it sounds like the band pored over it for days, deciding every note. Whereas the modern stuff sometimes reflects the whole "We're recording and writing at the same time" thing--there isn't a gestation period for quality control that allows those sections to become interesting journeys of their own a lot of the time.

There's also something about I&W's production that seems to unify the songs better than any album since.

[BlobVanDam]

This always beings me to the question of how Metropolis' instrumental section fits the song any better than any modern DT song. It's just a random, shreddy, chaotic section with a 200bpm carnival solo in the middle. How does that fit the rest of the song and the lyrics? It doesn't. And the transition into the instrumental section isn't exactly smooth either.
Granted, it's an awesome instrumental section, but the point is this isn't something exclusive to modern DT.

Yeah, this gets at what I was saying in the second paragraph of my last post. And for the record, I agree with this viewpoint. But there's just some spark behind those I&W sections that isn't always there with the modern stuff. It doesn't sound tossed-off. It does sound oddly placed, but it sounds like the band pored over it for days, deciding every note. Whereas the modern stuff sometimes reflects the whole "We're recording and writing at the same time" thing--there isn't a gestation period for quality control that allows those sections to become interesting journeys of their own a lot of the time.

I totally get that, and those IaW instrumental sections are godly.
I've just never liked the specific criticism of modern DT having jarring transitions, when it's always been a part of DT's songwriting, even in many of their most universally loved songs, and I have no problem with them doing it. If people think it's just a matter of quality/preference, then I'm fine with that opinion. But I generally don't have a problem with the way DT do transitions on more recent albums, and I think some of them get a bad wrap when they shouldn't.

[KevShmev]

MP was pretty strict about not repeating songs on subsequent live albums

And some of the latter live albums/DVDs suffered as a result.  Score, in particular, is an extremely weak anniversary set list, and this is because he got too caught up in trying to not repeat songs instead of picking the songs that best represented the band (which is what an anniversary show should be for).  I mean, I Walk Beside You, The Answer Lies Within, Vacant and Innocence Faded make the 20th anniversary set list, but Take the Time, Learning to Live, The Glass Prison and Voices do not?  Okay.

[The Presence of Frenemies]

Here's another possibly controversial opinion of mine: JR's use of the continuum is awesome and he should use it more. The continuum solo in ANTR might be my favorite "traditional" JR solo--if it's not, it's close.

[wasteland]

MP was pretty strict about not repeating songs on subsequent live albums

And some of the latter live albums/DVDs suffered as a result.  Score, in particular, is an extremely weak anniversary set list, and this is because he got too caught up in trying to not repeat songs instead of picking the songs that best represented the band (which is what an anniversary show should be for).  I mean, I Walk Beside You, The Answer Lies Within, Vacant and Innocence Faded make the 20th anniversary set list, but Take the Time, Learning to Live, The Glass Prison and Voices do not?  Okay.

In three years they will most likely make the 30th anniversary DVD, assuming there will be one! 

[?]

In three years they will most likely make the 30th anniversary DVD, assuming there will be one! 

Hopefully we will finally get a version of LTL where James nails the F#5 then!

[Lucidity]

Here's another possibly controversial opinion of mine: JR's use of the continuum is awesome and he should use it more. The continuum solo in ANTR might be my favorite "traditional" JR solo--if it's not, it's close.

I completely agree.

[MoraWintersoul]

In three years they will most likely make the 30th anniversary DVD, assuming there will be one! 

Hopefully we will finally get a version of LTL where James nails the F#5 then!

Oh we have plenty of those, just nothing on the official albums

[Cedar redaC]

This isn't really a controversial opinion, but rather an unusual thing about me as a Dream Theater fan. I own 5 studio albums by Dream Theater: Images and Words, Awake, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, Octavarium, and a Dramatic Turn of Events.

What's controversial about that? Where's Scenes, or Falling Into Infinity? Why don't I have all of them yet? I'm not really sure why, I have just discovered a lot of music in the last year and a half, and I've been trying to build a balanced library, so Dream Theater has taken a slight backseat when it comes to buying new albums.

I'm sorry if I'm not forming my statements very well, I'm on some medicine recovering from getting my wisdom teeth out and it's making me really tired.

[BlobVanDam]

This isn't really a controversial opinion, but rather an unusual thing about me as a Dream Theater fan. I own 5 studio albums by Dream Theater: Images and Words, Awake, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, Octavarium, and a Dramatic Turn of Events.

You don't have SFAM? At the very least you can't call yourself a DT fan until you have SFAM!

Whatever you're in the middle of doing, drop it and go out and buy it immediately. I don't care if you're in the middle of working, or about to go to sleep, or taking a dump, or hooked up to life support, just get up right now, hop into your car (or if you don't drive, run like hell), and find a copy of SFAM. Don't even bother coming back home tonight unless you're holding a copy of SFAM.
Then crank it, and report back in about 75 minutes or so.

[Cedar redaC]

I edited my post to explain why I probably can't get it immediately. I do really want to get it soon though. I'll go to my record store sometime next week probably and order it in.

[TheGreatPretender]

You don't have SFAM? At the very least you can't call yourself a DT fan until you have SFAM!

Whatever you're in the middle of doing, drop it and go out and buy it immediately. I don't care if you're in the middle of working, or about to go to sleep, or taking a dump, or hooked up to life support, just get up right now, hop into your car (or if you don't drive, run like hell), and find a copy of SFAM. Don't even coming back home tonight unless you're holding a copy of SFAM.
Then crank it, and report back in about 75 minutes or so.

You know, I was actually thinking about buying a second copy of it, just to have a sealed one.

[BlobVanDam]

You don't have SFAM? At the very least you can't call yourself a DT fan until you have SFAM!

Whatever you're in the middle of doing, drop it and go out and buy it immediately. I don't care if you're in the middle of working, or about to go to sleep, or taking a dump, or hooked up to life support, just get up right now, hop into your car (or if you don't drive, run like hell), and find a copy of SFAM. Don't even coming back home tonight unless you're holding a copy of SFAM.
Then crank it, and report back in about 75 minutes or so.

You know, I was actually thinking about buying a second copy of it, just to have a sealed one.

Couldn't hurt!

[King Postwhore]

I wish I kept a sealed version of the live SFAM album when I got it on 9/11.

[wasteland]

This isn't really a controversial opinion, but rather an unusual thing about me as a Dream Theater fan. I own 5 studio albums by Dream Theater: Images and Words, Awake, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, Octavarium, and a Dramatic Turn of Events.

You don't have SFAM? At the very least you can't call yourself a DT fan until you have SFAM!

Whatever you're in the middle of doing, drop it and go out and buy it immediately. I don't care if you're in the middle of working, or about to go to sleep, or taking a dump, or hooked up to life support, just get up right now, hop into your car (or if you don't drive, run like hell), and find a copy of SFAM. Don't even bother coming back home tonight unless you're holding a copy of SFAM.
Then crank it, and report back in about 75 minutes or so.

Why should he bother buying SFAM? He already has the three best DT albums and Six Degrees

[Cedar redaC]

I'll pick up Scenes as soon as I can. I've listened to it, and as far as I can tell, it's basically a defining album for the "Dream Theater sound".

[wasteland]

I'll pick up Scenes as soon as I can. I've listened to it, and as far as I can tell, it's basically a defining album for the "Dream Theater sound".

Indeed, all jokes aside. Not as much as Images And Words, but it's a crime for a DT fan not to own it! It's basically the second youth of the band, the basin that fueled live shows for the next decade in one way or another, the term of comparison for any concept album in the prog-metal scene. You better buy it, it's a beacon of progressive music!

[Cedar redaC]

Well, when you put it that way...

[TheGreatPretender]

I think Images and Words introduced a new, revolutionary sound and dynamic to Progressive Metal. It has established what Prog Metal would be all through the 90's, and largely beyond. But what Images and Words has invented, I would say Scenes From A Memory has perfected. Personally, I'm the type of person who prefers the perfected and refined, rather than just something new and unique. Of course, Images and Words is awesome enough to follow very closely behind, but still, SFAM is #1 in my book.

[King Postwhore]

For me at the time I was missing the heavy progressive music.  Not many bands were heading that way so when I heard the heaviness while still being prog, I had to get it.  Everything was so tinny in the late 80's.

[Marion Crane]

Octavarium is easily my least favorite of the "epics"

[GasparXR]

Well, see, to me, when a song doesn't settle on anything long enough for me to get a musical response from it, that tells me that chaos is the whole point.  Like, you've talked about Metropolis before as an example of a song with crazy jarring transitions, but to me, Metropolis is a song about crazy jarring transitions.  The first time I heard that song I thought it was completely batshit insane.  Luckily it was intriguing enough to make me listen again, and by the fourth or fifth listen I was acclimated to the chaos of it, and nowadays I adore every chaotic moment of it.

It's sort of like spinning around in circles.  Sometimes, spinning around in circles can be very fun.  But if your goal is to get somewhere, then spinning around in circles is just a meaningless waste of time. 

So to me, a song with lots of crazy tiny sections is like spinning around in circles for the fun of it, whereas a cohesive song with one large crazy section pasted in the middle of it feels more like trying to get from point A to point B and randomly stopping to spin in circles on the way there. 

That's some very good analogies. A good piece, that goes somewhere, but also has a crazy instrumental section, would be more like getting from point A to point B, and then randomly spinning in circles while still moving in a straight line. Difficult to do, but if you can do it, you get fun + still getting to point B. For example, Point A is the end of Home, Point B is the beginning of One Last Time. The entire path inbetween is The Dance of Eternity; spinning in circles the whole way through, but still moving forward. It's at least somewhat cohesive and gets somewhere.

[Zook]

WDADU > SC & BCSL

Why? Because there is nothing on WDADU that makes me roll my eyes or cringe.

[CodyWanKenobi]

I think John Myung talks too fuckin much.

[wasteland]

I think John Myung talks too fuckin much.

You can't be serious 

[Jaffa]

That's some very good analogies.

Thank you.