OCTAVARIUM

Octavarium is as the title suggests the 8th album from Dream Theater. The last album from Dream Theater called Train of Thought was a really heavy and pretty dark affair. I was never too thrilled with that one. Octavarium is very different compared to the complex and dark Train of Thought. The song structures are generally much simpler and the mood a bit lighter.

The album consists of eight songs. The first seven are generally pretty normally structured songs with focus on vocal melodies while the last song which is the title track is a 24 minute epic where there is more place for instrumental excess. Besides the title track which is pretty good I only think The Root Of All Evil, The Answer Lies Within and the melodic Never Enough is worth my time. The rest is pretty trivial. All songs are good, but IMO they don´t add anything new to Dream Theater´s discography. The songs are not very memorable and it´s a big problem IMO.

The musicianship is brilliant as ever, but there is no warmth in the music. It leaves me cold most of the time. One positive thing on Octavarium is that John Petrucci´s guitar solos are very melodic compared to the show of soloing of the last couple of albums. Jordan Rudess also plays some very melodic solos on the keyboard the only thing is that his solos doesn´t really sound like keyboard solos. The solo sound Jordan Rudess uses sounds like a guitar. Why on earth do you play keyboard solos that sounds like guitar solos when you already have a guitarist in the band ? The advantage of having a keyboard IMO is that you can play with all sorts of sounds that does NOT sound like guitar, bass or drums. Well it´s an aquired taste for sure.

The production is actually pretty good and I must say it´s Portnoy and Petrucci´s best production to date. Finally they have made a professional sounding production.

The overall impression I have after listening to Octavarium is that it´s a good progressive metal album. It adds nothing new to the genre or to Dream Theater´s discography though and therefore I think it´s a very average album. 3 stars is deserved here.