Bought the album today, along with a Kenny Garrett album. Listened to it on the drive home. I've listened to each of the 3 singles twice, which are the first 2 tracks, so everything else after was new.
Beautiful day out, sunny skies, some clouds, very windy. Haven't been listening to much Dream Theater, kinda fell off after MP left, though I enjoyed SC and BC&SL I would not have been opposed to a ~5 year break. However, I enjoyed ADTOE and think it's a good album, with drums that are a bit low in the mix. I was not a big fan of the last couple of albums, bought both blind excl. singles, as well as Distance Over Time; DT12 had sound problems, and I felt like many of the compositions had an unfinished quality to them, or the tunes weren't given time to marinate, so to speak, and I felt The Astonishing was very bloated, almost a chore to get through, and I'm not into the whole Broadway/Disney musical style so that didn't help.
With that said I thoroughly enjoyed Distance Over Time. So many elements in the songs that I felt have been missing or hard to find for the last half dozen albums or so. While it has more of the 'modern DT' sound at times, the technical through composed aspect of their music has returned, but is not overdone like on, say, Outcry from ADTOE. This new album has more grooves than the last bunch of albums, as well. The drums sound pretty good, as they did on the last album, but this may finally be the album of Mangini-unleashed. Some nice drum parts in there, really creative stuff. We even get some great bass lines everywhere, the bass was quite noticeable during most of the listen. Some Rush/Steve Morse/Yes influence felt here and there which kept the music bright and energetic. But also there were some hard riffs in there as well, and really sounded fun, unlike the last few albums IMO.
I'm going to go as far as saying this is the best album since Six Degrees, which I think I said about ADTOE when it came out, but I think I like this Distance Over Time more. The sound is more full, they've been playing with each other for almost 10 years now, but the conditions in which this album was created explains a lot too. This album SOUNDS like they were having a great time at the house-studio they lived in last summer writing music. I can't say much on any individual songs, I'll have to re-listen, which I obviously will. I did note that the last song Pale Blue Dot seemed to be the most intense song, and the final track, labeled as a bonus track Viper King really raised my eyebrows a little because of how much it sounds like they're actually trying to expand their sound, without worrying about keeping their "core sound" with them album-to-album, which I understand doing for a band this far along into their career, but I would not complain about an album of songs where the band really experiments with different sounds, like they almost did during the SDOIT sessions, bringing in World music influences, etc... I don't wanna hear that they did different things on the last album, TA is different, and I want a 'band' album. But anyway, the bonus track has a funky hard groove to it, mixed in with some double time, and a couple other things I thought sounded different for the band, I can't wait to listen to this album again, haven't said that in a while.
TL;DR It's a good one.
Topic: Official Distance Over Time discussion thread (Read 192886 times)
