Completely disagree with you guys, TSF was the best 12-step song since TGP for me. TDS is easily the weakest.
This. But I think this idea that the "12-step suite just has to be played live" is just silly. Those five songs, one after another, would get tedious real fast, because of the countless recurring riffs and melodies and lyrics. Not to mention that they do not naturally flow into another.
Why does everyone lump Octavarium in with Systematic Chaos and Black Clouds ?
To me Octavarium is in the run of great albums from Scenes that ended with Systematic Chaos.
Moreover - Octavarium is my absolute favourite Dream Theater album.
I love how it sounds - it has a nice vibe throughout. I don't skip a single song and the title track hasn't been beaten since IMO.
Because the songwriting is very uneven on that record, much like it is on Systematic Chaos. It's almost like, they put so much effort into the whole Octavarium thing - writing every song in a different key - that they put themselves in a corner and came out of it saying, "Yeah, we pulled it off," but the songwriting, which was dictated by the whole key/8V thing, suffered greatly. Songwriting is at its best when creativity flows naturally, not when guys say, "Okay, this song HAS to be written in G."
I think the idea of Octavarium was pretty cool. As far as songwriting goes, it's pretty easy to transpose keys for most things, so that would be a non-issue. I just think about half the songs on Octavarium aren't all that
good original sounding. Part of the problem -at least for me- was this seemed to be the height of Dream Theater's "copping other bands' sounds" period. This lead to a plethora of tracks that sound like "Dream Theater doing a U2 impression" or "Dream Theater trying to sound like Muse" when most of us would have preferred that Dream Theater just be....Dream Theater.
For me, personally, they could have made more records like "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" and maybe just explore and expand upon THEIR OWN sound on those subsequent albums. Instead they went with this inspiration corner thing and I think that actually worked against them.
Despite all of that, based on the way ADTOE sounded and on what I'm hearing about the new single and how it sounds.....I'm starting to wonder if Dream Theater will ever put out another recording that sounds as good as Octavarium does on a sonic level? I mean, it's far from perfect, but Octavarium is pure sonic bliss compared to the wet-blanket-over-speakers sound of ADTOE.
Surely a band this far along in their career has SOMEONE to help them sound good?