A VIEW FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD

I'm mainly writing this review as a counterpoint to all the baffling praise that's being heaped on this album. The number of five-star reviews came as a big surprise to me after checking in here to hear/read other people's opinions. THIS is what many of you consider to be a five (or even four) star Dream Theater album? Really? Up there with 'Images and Words' and 'Scenes From A Memory'? Never mind the classics from other bands. Surely we have long gone past the point of praising these guys for being world-class musicians. "Their technical ability is beyond reproach - 5 stars." "The production is great - 5 stars." No - the music is, at best, bland and rehashed from the worst moments of their past albums. The recent LTE3 and Petrucci solo albums (although the latter has some really nice moments) solidified for me that they're long spent of great work.

I wanted to like this album, I really did. Dream Theater was for years my favourite band, and some of their earlier work remains among my favourite albums, but they're an empty, hollow shell of what they once were and they have been for 15+ years. There's nothing here - absolutely nothing - that they haven't already done ad nauseam in previous albums. LaBrie has - wisely - decided he isn't going to try to sing high or low notes, and he sounds good at the range he sings, but this means that the vocals are boring to listen to (let's not even talk about the lyrics...). John Myung made a brief appearance for the first time in his career in the last album, but he's vanished into obscurity again. Petrucci and Rudess have both, once again, created an album of random noodling with almost no attempt to create interesting melodies. The few attempts they do make all fail, save for one nice little section from 1:30 to 2:30 on Awaken The Master. The rest of it is so, so tedious and uninteresting that the only track I can listen to from beginning to end is The Alien, but even that I'd only give 3 stars at best.

I get it, they're growing older and their creativity is spent, but they enjoy what they do and want to keep doing it. I'm happy for them, I really am, but the music has suffered for it.