A few weeks ago I made a post about me being unsure whether I should get tickets for one of the Dream Theater "The Astonishing" concerts nearby. Having listened to the album a few times now, I'm glad I waited.
The thing is: I really appreciate the fact that Dream Theater tried to do something radically different. But this album just isn't working for me. At all. My biggest problem is that I don't listen to Dream Theater for lyrics and this album is really heavy on story. Which is fine, since it's supposed to be a rock opera, and hey, SFAM was a concept album, too. But the difference is that with SFAM, I could ignore the lyrical content while still enjoying the music itself. "The Astonishing" feels like they put lyrics first and wrote the music later - which is the exact opposite of how they usually write their stuff if I remember correctly. And I feel like that really shines through, especially during the first act which feels like half of the stuff is story with some pretty piano sounds and orchestration in the back.
I'm glad many of you like it, but it's just not for me. There are some moments on this album that I really like (and I
love the fact that there is a awesome guitar solo over a super simple 4/4 drum beat at the end of "A New Beginning"), but I feel like if you don't care about the story, this album really drags on and doesn't really have enough bright spots musically to keep my interested. I'm also a little sad that it seems like Mangini and Myung didn't have too much input.
So yeah, thats just my short review. As I said, there are some songs that are really neat ("Three Days" is pretty cool for example) and I'm sure I will be listening to the album a few more times over the weeks, but overall, so far, I'm really disappointed.
Edit:
This part of Dystopian Overture is basically the
theme from Luigi's Mansion
Topic: *Official* The Astonishing discussion thread (Read 518659 times)
