SYSTEMATIC CHAOS

Coming off the heels of an album which I personally found great, but which doesn't seem to have a very large following 'round here, I listen to "Systematic Chaos" and try to find out where things went wrong. Personally I don't care too much about the similarities between the styles of certain songs and other bands' style; DT has provided enough things to the progmetal genre to prevent me from screaming if suddenly some song sounds "like somebody else". In any case "borrowing" from other sources is not a recent phenomenon for them, "Hollow Years" sounded an awful lot like Sting! Remember those days?

The point here is that, no matter how hard I try, I can't connect with this album. It doesn't do anything for me. After a really good opening song (best one here, in my opinion) and a pleasant ballad, there's not a single song that I don't find overlong and ultimately boring. And this comes from someone who has no problem listening to endless (for instance) Flower Kings songs, so it's not a matter of having short songs or long songs. In this case, almost all of them and keep on going long after running out of things to say. For me, this album is a collection of songs which could have been good if the band had made up their minds. But they try every song to cover so many styles that the end result is close to "Who cares? Get on with it!".

"The Dark Eternal Night" could have been good and powerful, yet it jumps from a trashy beginning to a pop chorus and suddenly, weird out-of-nowhere prog sections. Way too much, way too long. "Repentance" has a beautiful but ENDLESS coda. "Prophets of War" is just dumb. God knows why "The Ministry of Lost Souls" lasts 15 minutes. And the same goes for "In the Presence of Enemies, pt.2": I expected a good continuation of the first song, my favorite here, but... nah, dumb dark lyrics (a constant throughout) which go on and on and on... it's even painful to listen to the whole album from start to finish. Even the solos feel forced this time. On the performance side the guys offer their usual professional skills, but on the writing side, for instance, what happened to Rudess??? He sounds weird for the sake of weirdness.

In any case, I couldn't call this bad... I call it sad. A huge promise which progressively dissolves with each extra minute most songs go on for.