THE ASTONISHING

I have listened to this album quite a few times to try and understand where some people are getting these "masterpiece" ideas from, and unfortunately, all I can say is quite the opposite. I have never been a huge fan of this band, but some of their earlier work is quite good. A lot of it is more fun and less self-important, but it appears with the departure of Portnoy, the fun has gone down and the self-importance has increased significantly. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite correlate with the quality of music. The music itself is fairly bland, standard Dream Theater fare, except with less interplay between the band. The album is all vocals/guitar/keyboards, with no drum or bass parts really sticking out of the mix and piquing the interest. These songs could have benefited from more diverse use of the instruments, for the whole thing ends up being very samey, sonically and texturally. Theoretically, the instrumentation and ballad heavy tracklist could have worked, but the writing itself isn't particularly new or invigorating for the band. Utter snooze fest. Not recommended for anyone, unless you are a die-hard-to-a-fault fan of the band.