Controversial opinion, please don't attack me, but given that DoT thus far has failed to wow me on a personal level, and I really haven't felt the need to keep replaying it, all of the praise for the album seems really weird to me. I don't get what's so amazing about it and why people seem to be losing their minds over it.
And it's caused me to wonder if so much of the apparently ubiquitous praise for the album isn't so much for what the album is, but for the fact of what it isn't, i.e., The Astonishing. People seem to be so happy that the album is not overblown, is not self-indulgent (by DT standards), and shows a lot of more of the "playing" that DT is known for that they're missing the fact that the album is really just kinda there and really is no great shakes (IMO). Seeing them a few weeks ago in Upper Darby, I honestly was more excited for the 1 or 2 deep cuts from other albums I anticipated we'd get, more so than anything they might have played off the new album. There was nothing to me that screamed "gotta hear this live!"
I also can't understand why to my ears this mix is so much flatter than it should be. There's no oomph to the album at all. And if your argument is "well, you need a really good setup to get it," that's a failure on their part, to make sure the album sounds as good as possible across all platforms. I also feel like the songs have a weird structure to them, where they start off a bit to get going, and then they get going... and then they just kinda trail off and end (I feel like At Wit's End and Pale Blue Dot suffer the most from this, and all the interplay at the start of Barstool Warrior devolves into the typical sort of plodding stuff that I think DT has been too guilty of over time).
There is stuff I enjoy about the album: the interesting melodies during the verses of Paralyzed, the noodliness in Fall into the Light, the aggression of Room 137, the beauty of Out of Reach (the one song I think I'd really actually have wanted to hear live, aside from maybe Room 137). But I don't feel like the album is anywhere near "man, run out and get it NOW."
It's come out, I've seen the tour, the show didn't blow me away (I wasn't keen on seeing 1/2 of the show taken up by SFaM, which I already caught back when it came out), next.