You guys describing the music on the new album as bits and pieces
of other Mangini-era DT "but with better production" just sounds like it's going to be DoT II, a rather bland and boring DT album imo.
What makes DoT bland? Just curious.
It's a very safe album, which somewhat makes sense coming off a controversial album like The Astonishing.
Besides the fact that I hear the band repeating themselves often in the post-MP era, I find Barstool and At Wit's End to be the only songs I revisit with any regularity. The rest don't do much for me. I find most DT albums with Mangini filled with cool parts and creative sections, but I tend to have issues with the construction of the songs themselves, like I feel like so many choruses don't match the vibe of the verses or bridges.
DT's song structures have been simplified over the years, too, and I don't know why they feel the need to do so many songs in the intro/ABABCAB/outro or similar pop structures.
Then you have a song like S2N sounds like 3 different song ideas forced together. The chorus feels out of place among the verses and main riffs, and the outro just does not belong in that song (and is a diet Dark Eternal Night outro) There are other DT songs like this in the modern era.
The Ministry of Lost Souls may have an out of place instrumental section, but the 'song' part of it makes sense together. A song can have crazy parts, seemingly unrelated to the song, as long as it sounds like it works. A lot of recent songs sound very cut-n-paste to me.