Dream Theater - Midnight Messiah. Thoughts?

I don't think that I've enjoyed a DT album since Octavarium from 2005, which was probably the last year of LaBrie still occasionally pulling a decent live. Octavarium was also the last album where voice effects sounded like a creative decision rather than a compromise for LaBrie declining vocal ability.
But the LaBrie bashing is something that's been done to death, my real issue with modern DT, is that they're trying to sound too much like themselves.
It's one thing to have individuality in style, which granted all of the band members have. When you hear a modern DT song you instantly recognize it for being a DT song, and that's my problem.
DT for half of their career, was a fairly experimental without a single cohesive and consistent style.
They branched into many styles, from Jazz to Jack-Swing, Pop, Symphonic and etc, and after Octavarium their style became the encapsulation of all the stereotypes people had about their music.
The only exception to this was the Astonishing, which, I didn't like all that much.
I remember that bands like Dragonforce were bashed for their early albums being way too formulaic, and especially for the incompetence of their lead singer at the time. Due to their past influence DT has achieved an untouchability status, that I don't think they deserve at this point. Again, not that their new stuff is terrifically bad or anything. It just not for me.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: but it's also unfortunate that they did not take this opportunity to try a little harder to innovate - instead they churned out literally a bad dream version of themselves.

I'll die on the hill of "A Change Of Seasons" being the single greatest song they ever wrote.

MikeEnRegalia wrote: ^ That's a comfortable hill to die on