After quite some listenings, here's what I've come to think of the album...
The goodSuch a lot of stuff. The very inception of the record. Their desire to go away for a while and work as a family, with everyone having their say. A teamwork even in the lyrics, which are all various degrees of good with no corny moments. The production. ALL the songs, because all the songs are great and there is no stinker. The fact that everything was kept concise and to the point, making this an album very easy to listen to, and not "easy" because they're all commercial short songs. And of course the many brilliant moments (Fall Into the Light's melodic solo, the melodies of Barstool Warrior, basically all of At Wit's End...) discussed at lenght in these pages. Basically this is the album I more or less imagined they would do, and it's what they gave the idea they could do by their description of it. A modern, current Dream Theater album with a lot of both heavy and melodic moments and no cringeworthy moments.
The badBasically nothing. There's nothing on this album that is bad, mediocre or very sub par.
The "It's not that I don't like it, I do, really, but...Oh boy, here comes the minor nitpicking that will get me lynched
I like all the songs to the point that I can't even pick a clear favorite, nor a lesser one, but.... there are little details here and there throughout the songs that made me feel that with just some minor improvements they could have been so much better.
Stating the obvious, this is how I experienced the songs, it's not that I know better than DT about writing a song of course.... but here are the, albeit VERY MINOR DETAILS, things that I wish could have changed a bit:
- As I said before (I promise it's the last time
), the choruses. Never with a DT album I had thought so many times (or probably I never thought it at all period) "where are the choruses?". Took me quite some time to accept that what felt a bridge at best were the actual choruses in Fall into the Light, Room 137 and Barstool Warrior. Out of the three, the latter probably has the best choruses, but at the first listenings it totally felt like a bridge and there was no climax like it happens for example in Bridges in the Sky, when after two times of "Sun, come shine my way" it explodes in the grandiose "And at last the time has come".
- Even when there are choruses, they seem to cut down on the momentum. Unthetered Angel is fine, but when in the final chorus the end of it is near, with that little pause after "Don't be afraid of letting go......" seemed a good moment to repeat it twice, and only after the second time finishing with "open your heart, be set free". Uh well, no biggie.
But take Paralyzed for example, it goes, capitalizing for emphasis, "A HEART THAT FEELS NO PAIN, ADDICTED TO THE GAME", you're in the moment, and then "BREAKING BENEATH the strain... I am paralyzed". It winds down too soon. Yes, I get that it gets repeated a lot at the end which is the climax of the song, but during the piece it feels to short.
Same for At Wit's End, best chorus of the album, but then again, "DON'T LEAVE ME NOW, DON'T LEAVE ME NOW, I KNOW THAT IT'S TEARING YOU APART", hell yeah, wonderful, then "DON'T LEAVE ME NOW, DON'T LEAVE ME NOW, come undone". Already? again, not every song has to be the same but.... it winds down just when I was so pumped up.
- Solo sections: they're all concise and to the point, and even when they really go for it, like the end of Fall into the Light and S2N, they keep it to the point rather than going off the rails for three minutes. But, at the same time, they just... start and end, there's no sense of bringing it to a conclusion. I'm there listening to S2N and Pale Blue Dot and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, "oh here comes back the chorus". I've always complained of the long solo sections of previous albums, like for example The Ministry of Lost Souls, but at least the end of that "wankfest" has that big dramatic unison piece that leads back into the initial riff, you know it's climaxing. This doesn't happen on this record.
- Pale Blue Dot... I like the song. But I almost spoiled it for myself having enormous expectations given how much I love the subject matter, which I think is so wonderful and intelligent that it should have been reserved for Illumination Theory, whose music would serve the Pale Blue Dot speech much better than a generic menancing and eerie song. If I forget the song is named Pale Blue Dot, I have no complaints.
----
So, as I said: the point is not that DT did some things wrong and that I know better. Of course not. But as little as these nitpickings are, they "annoy" me because I like everything about the album, from the approach to the actual songs, and to feel that, for my own and solely personal tastes obviously, they've come THIS CLOSE to create songs that I would call perfect falling short of these minor details it just irks me a bit. Like, to make a silly example, "yes, I like this car, it's everything I wanted it to be, it's not that you got me a totally different car, but.... couldn't the color be just a tiny bit darker and couldn't the interiors be just a tiny little bit more comfortable for my butt and couldn't the placement of the steering wheel have been not different, just one little cm nearer to me?"
I mean, I am so close to love the album to death, but I "just" like it a lot. And I fear in the long run it won't have much longevity for me. But for now I spin it as much as I can 'cause it grows stronger with every listening. Perphaps in a month or two I'll come back here to eat my own words, but for now I'm just this short of really, truly, madly loving the album that it's a pity.
Glad at least that the vast majority of the fanbase embraces it even more than me, this sense of global excitement is great, expecially after not everyone shared my complete enthusiasm and adoration for The Astonishing.
Topic: Official Distance Over Time discussion thread (Read 189415 times)
