OCTAVARIUM

"Twilight in Olympus"

The often adjudicated originality, which I can't find really often on any release is here on the lowest plane. Everything I can hear is some musicians, which combine virtuosic mindlessness with very obvious of bands like U2, Muse and Linkin Park, just to name some. The sound is terrible. The guitar is totally overloaded during the riffing, ok during the solos, although they can't attract. With such an over-distortion, which has nothing to do with true metal or hard-rock, but integrates well into the pop-metal/rock genre, the drums are too weak, not to be scoffed at the style of Mr.Portnoy. He once had better times. John Petrucci's accompaniment is often quite questionable, and his solos, although they are not really bad, can't really stand to be amazing, but are just a blip in the background. The bass is ok but I think it has a bit too much tremble, but that can be disregarded. Really annoying are the keyboards and the vocals. Jordan Rudess is everything but serious. His synthesizers sound like a strange techno-mixture and his style, while exploiting his sounds, is bothering and far behind virtuosic compositional abilities. James LaBrie contributes a lot to the bad final result, with his pseudo-emotional, therefore slimy, vocals, sounding either much too high or as if he would be young child, performing a song in front of the family. In "These Walls" he even sounds like Britney Spears who wants to be a bad, bad girl.

The music as I said, is much too overloaded. While I enjoy real "metal", this pop-blend is just unnerving. Some weird, but still partly original ideas, like the techno-drum-accompaniment in "The Answer lies within", just leave a disapproval and lead to the downfall of DT, which will come, probably. Nevertheless there are some nice atmospheric segments and some nice melodies, which are sadly destructed by James LaBrie. The atmospheric synthstring-passages, aren't destroyed by anything but over-shadowed, by the awful rest. The "best" song in this tainted soup, is "Panic Attack", with a nice intro and some nice melodies. The solos, are...well.Jordan Rudess typical and a neoclassical try by John Petrucci, which is a flop, in my opinion. I think he just isn't such a great neoclassical player, more blues-orientated. The epic, besides the uncreativity and the slowly decaying time, involving boredom, is just not as awesome as many people say. I don't deny that there is a nice concept behind it, but it's musically not really well converted.

All in all you can just say, the sound is bad, the musicians' performance lacks brilliancy and the unoriginality shows the lack of ideas of this meanwhile maybe too old band.

This is prog-metal how it shouldn't be! 1 star maximum.

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