It shouldn't be, but is it a coincidence that most voices either purporting or minimizing the Astonishing's perceived diversity tend to respectively like or dislike the album? I think it's a placeholder discussion. You could "solve" it by laying out a spreadsheet of the album pointing out the genres and styles in each track (boring). I think the feeling that it's too same-y is more of a result of being unaccustomed to the musical format than an objective interpretation (which is fine), and that's kind of what I tried to address.
It's certainly not a coincidence. I believe that the fact that there are many slow moments on the piano is responsible for this. Those who hate these moments certainly get bored as fuck and are left with the feeling that the album is just that.
But it's not just that. The album has several different moments. When I listen to TA I hear prog metal, straight rock, prog rock, piano ballads, piano rock, soundtrack music, military march, tango, swing jazz, broadway music, disney music, heavy metal, ...
I can't think of any other DT album where I can hear all of this. If anyone knows one, I welcome a recommendation.
TA is not a perfect album, far from it. But I really don't think the album's lack of diversity is a standout point. I think it's a weird idea. The album is not ToT.
Of the albums made with MM, the album that definitely suffers from a lack of diversity is the last one.
In several pages I haven’t seen anyone really define what “diversity” means or what the criteria is, so the whole discussion is just talking past each other.
To me it can be anything from dynamics, song structure, instrumentation, style. Also with the acknowledgement that Dream Theater has some set parameters - you know you’re going to get odd time signatures, technical instrumentals, some kind of sound that can fit in a prog bucket.
With that being said, I tend to think that Falling Into Infinity or Six Degrees kinda showcase the largest range and variety of styles. FII because the band hadn’t really developed a set formula yet so there’s a lot of different stuff they’re trying that they never really did again, stuff like the Crimson-y New Millennium with the Chapman stick, everything the Spanish influenced Hollow Years, the production choices on Take Away My Pain.
Six Degrees because each song does its own thing and doesn’t really follow any predictable structure. Glass Prison is an all out riff fest but the. Misunderstood has this real slow burn beginning. Then of course the title track with the orchestral instruments is sonically totally outside of the first disc. Each song feels like its own sound, style, and structure while still having an identifiably DT flavor.
The Astonishing just isn’t it for me. There are some interesting songwriting choices and the way the vocals drive a lot of the material is unique for the band, but I have always felt like the album was consciously not really that “diverse” musically. It’s supposed to flow as one piece and for better or worse it has a sound that it largely sticks to.
You are quite right about the definition of diversity.
I think that in a way, intuitively we all have an idea of diversity as different forms of approaches, styles, genres, musical languages, mainly.
That's why historically we had no difficulty in perceiving Octavarium as a very diverse album in the band's discography, as the construction of the album seemed to make a lot of effort to make it very obvious like "let's do a piano ballad. Now a U2 song. Now aggressive prog metal. Now epic prog. Now Muse-like music etc." In the same way that we recognize ToT as practically monothematic "aggressive prog metal and sonic wanking".
It is in this sense that I say that I&W is not exactly a super diverse album. Even though some songs are more complex and intricate and others are a little more direct or slow, they all bring the prog metal style that characterized Dream Theater and was so copied over the years (with the exception of the Kenny G moment). You can easily combine Metropolis, Take the Time, Learning to Live, Under a Glass Moon in the same team. It's already more than half the album. And you can add Pull Me Under and Surrounded to the club.
If we compare it to the two that came later, this becomes even more obvious.
Basically, it's an interesting discussion about musical diversity in DT. If the album in question wasn't TA (which has the gift of ruining any and all dreamtheater discussions
) but any other, perhaps the atmosphere would be better.
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