Dream Theater

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Mosh said:
Some guys in the band have classical music backgrounds.
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DT has stated that The Astonishing is a rock opera. I believe they may take this to an extreme rarely seen in rock. For most bands, "rock opera" just means "concept album with a plot". I think DT is actually trying to create a genuine opera in the classical tradition. Consider the limited tour, playing opera houses, and rumors of special guests. This may turn out to be a full operatic production.

Lots of people are calling it cheesy, etc... but I'm waiting to see what actually happens. I love to see when bands put their reputation on the line with something ridiculous. I give them great respect for the attempt, at minimum - and sometimes such audacious ideas actually work.
 
SixesAlltheway said:
You'd think they were launching a MMORPG with this marketing.
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It's not impossible. I still predict they'll release a novelization with the album. This level of plot from the band that copied a Robin Williams movie for their last rock opera? John Petrucci may be a nerd, but I can't imagine him in his choking room drawing fantasy maps of future America.

In fact, Petrucci is known to "borrow" most of his lyrical ideas from other people. "The Dark Eternal Night" is a Lovecraft ripoff. "In The Presence of Enemies" stolen from a manga. "Six Degrees" has lines plagiarized from books about mental illness.

My hope is that Petrucci finally gave up and just hired a fantasy writer with a completed story. In line with my post above about the classical opera tradition: it was most common for composers to write their operas to scripts written by lyric writers. Those guys were called librettists, and operas were always written to a pre-existing libretto. Guys like Wagner who wrote both the words and music were the rare exceptions, not the norm. If DT is going full opera, I seriously hope they have a competent librettist not named Petrucci.
 
According to those emails, The Astonishing takes place in a future America. "Crescent Lake" on the DT map has a shape very similar to Lake Ontario. So here's DT map over a real map:
DTmap.png
 
I thought Scenes had a cheesy concept at first, but it shortly became my favourite DT album. That said, Lord Nafaryus will probably have little effect on what I think of the album. It will all be about the unique music DT has to offer.
 
I like everything so far (bar the number of tracks), but I like everything by DT so far too, so it's not as if I'm not biased :p

I'm pretty hyped, because - for what seems like a slightly more sophisticated Hunger Games so far - there is actually a lot of care put into that whole project. And that's always nice to see.
 
SinisterMinisterX said:
DT has stated that The Astonishing is a rock opera. I believe they may take this to an extreme rarely seen in rock. For most bands, "rock opera" just means "concept album with a plot". I think DT is actually trying to create a genuine opera in the classical tradition. Consider the limited tour, playing opera houses, and rumors of special guests. This may turn out to be a full operatic production.

Lots of people are calling it cheesy, etc... but I'm waiting to see what actually happens. I love to see when bands put their reputation on the line with something ridiculous. I give them great respect for the attempt, at minimum - and sometimes such audacious ideas actually work.
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This is exactly how I feel. Concept albums and rock "operas" are so overdone in the metal world at this point, very few really stick out. Maybe they'll outdo Aryeon with this? I'd be interested in something that actually uses the opera form. It'd be fresh and different. And with someone like Rudess in the band, they could probably do it justice.

If they actually wrote an Entr'acte, why shouldn't they call it that?
 
Collin said:
What's wrong with In the Presence of Enemies?
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Subjectivity entitles us to think whatever we want of the song itself: for my part, I think it is much too long for what it has to say. But I can conceive somebody else can like it, no problem. ;)

What's more difficult to swallow, it is that this song in particular is an uncredited, unacknowledged (only but after the release, in interviews) adaptation of a manga story called Priest.

Outside this moral stumbling block, the Dream Theater I fell in love with is the one that struggled to express personal feelings (Myung's texts -up to 1997- are my favorite without any possible competition in that regard) or at least adapt existing works in a personal way ("A Change of Seasons", partly based on Dead Poets Society).

SFAM, though it created the illusion of being a new start (new keyboard player, less label pressure, auto-production...), represents the discreet start of the band's downfall in terms of artistic honesty and inspiration, the concept of the album being based on an adaptation of the film Dead Again . Plus, they replaced a musician (Derek Sherinian) by a keyboard demonstrator :p... I'm being mean: I like Rudess (less than Derek though) but still think they should have kept LTE going .

On a more subjective note, that's when the music started to include unnecessarily long and/or overtechnical passages ("Beyond this life", "Home", "TDOE"... I like the major part of them, but all of them in my opinion could have benefited from some editing).
 
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Mosh said:
Concept albums and rock "operas" are so overdone in the metal world at this point
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I disagree. Example: I searched for all albums from 2015 I have on my computer, and out of about 70 albums I only found like 5 concept albums and that was stretching it.
 
First track leaked:


Lyrics are total bunk, but the music is interesting. Seems to be a logical next step after the last album, while still sounding a lot like classic DT (especially on the second half). Killer solo, too.
 
Speculation on reddit is that this will be the lead single, and this one song could be legal soon.

I'm not going to look at leaks for this one. I'll watch the buildup of info on the web page, and get the music when it's official.
 
With all the Rush similarities so far, I'm expecting something similar to The Looking Glass.
 
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