OCTAVARIUM

When I first picked up Octavarium I thought that it might be a good album protruding through the the rest of the unacceptably bad music that I've come across this year. I'd waited for a CD to come out that I could really, fully enjoy; an original, inspired album with no complex crap in the way of the pure music. I thought that out of any album of 2005, this would have been the best. Boy, how wrong I was.

While there is no question that Dream Theater are certainly up among the greatest progressive metal bands ever, I felt that this album was much a waste of my time and money. Yes, there are a couple of okay songs, particularly Panic Attack and These Walls, but the rest seemed out of place and unoriginal.

Octavarium seems like the only song the band cared about in the making of the album. The lyrics reach the listener and tell a story, personal or not, and make the song understandable. The rest of the songs seem to go off on tangents and lose the original meaning, as if the band just gave up and tried to covertheir mistakes by adding more instrumentals and lyrics.

Overall, Octavarium feels very forced and uninspired. I couldn't believe the weakness of the work that had come from such a talented band. It is really an awkward album; the music seems to be jumbled, and just a horrid reflection of some of their older work smashed together. I'm sure they put a lot of work into it, but it just doesn't feel right. I can't quite explain; the talent is there, along with the expression, but something gets in the way of making this CD great. The album seems distant, and almost as if it's overflowing with uneccesary vocals and intrumentation. If they would have just made the songs as they really wanted them, it would have been a very good album. It's almost as though they were trying so hard to make Octavarium their standout album that they forgot about the meaning, beauty, expression, and most importantly, the metal.