Label: Atlantic Records
Release date: 07.06.2005
Production: John Petrucci & Mike Portnoy
Album length: 75.46 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
“Octavaruim” is a “progressive Dream Theater-style” defined rock album from head to toe, and looking for “Images And Words” (1992) in it is just plain silly! The new Dream Theater never go wild aimlessly with cannon-like ultrasonic solo barrages. Instead they string together more compact motifs, so the tracks have a red thread running through them, they aren’t fragmented, and the album is consistent in that sense. The style of the furious “Train Of Thought” is forgotten. It kicks off with The Root Of All Evil, which rounds out the trilogy about Mike Portnoy and his years of alcohol addiction (for those of you who know the band better, the first two parts of the “Mike the alcoholic” trilogy are The Glass Prison and This Dying Soul). The track carries a massive distorted curtain, with dramatic vocal lines in the pre-chorus that leap into a chorus of suspicious melodiousness, something like Ana Lee from “Falling Into Infinity” (1995). If “Train Of Thought” was angry metal-ification and you could barely tell Rudess was on it, on the new record the keyboards contribute a major share to the new Dream Theater sound. The dreamy The Answer Lies Within and the slightly heavier These Walls (the one that served as the promo single, spun on radio stations before the album came out) are twins in both style and atmosphere, and they completely calm the record down. They’re gentle, sonically refined, rounded-off wholes with a beginning and an end. In terms of technique, a dose of innovation, exploration, though, neither is anything special. The chorus of These Walls itself probably brings the old “early nineties” days of the band back to life the most. Next comes the pop-rock-flavored I Walk Beside You, the first real surprise on the record. The guitar riff is pushed slightly into the background, like a ticking clock in the pre-chorus, and the bass guitar covers it with a lovely contrast in the production. That’s followed by an easygoing, excellent chorus (LaBrie is phenomenal in it) that sticks in your ear on the first listen. This one will probably appeal even to those of you who are crazy about U2.
Then comes the real prog metal punch with Panic Attack. A modernized, nu-metal-dirty guitar tone covers most of the sonic width, and the track has brilliant dynamics with those typical, artfully “Dream Theater-style” broken rhythms. In fact, this is the first time on the record that Portnoy’s double bass pedal wakes up and gets a proper stretch. A great turn in mood, through a song where spontaneous motifs flow and are played in a higher gear, with real virtue, the whole way through! Another novelty is the use of sound samples, or what should we call them? The use of “electronic soundscapes,” especially on the intros and outros of songs, something Dream Theater hadn’t done before, is a nice enrichment of the band’s expression. With the sea of notes they’ve burned through over their career, Dream Theater desperately need an injection of freshness, and this is one of the paths that saves their skin perfectly. Never Enough is also completely prog metal, heavy and rolling, and James LaBrie delivers an excellent vocal performance in it, bringing real drama to the song with his exceptional feel. It’s sometimes annoying that in the solos you can hardly tell Petrucci’s guitar from Rhudes’s toy, which the man himself calls “the continuum fingerboard”.
The record gets better from track to track and peaks at the end. Sacrified Sons is a song that once again summons the “razing of the twin towers” in the middle of New York. With the lyrics here the band definitely loses some seriousness and intellect, but Dream Theater are, after all, just “proud citizens of USA,” so we can only pity them today for peddling this kind of childishness. The track, which develops lazily at first, is tastefully seasoned with orchestrations the whole way through. Shortly before the halfway mark the guys get playful and start dangerously tearing through their arsenal of instruments. Only in this track do we run into the classic crossfire of solos between Petrucci and Rhudes. This song would have been the most impressive moment of the record, if it weren’t followed by the 24-minute title epic. An epic in the true sense of the word, both for its exceptional feel for melody-making and atmospheric upheavals and for its sense of building a solid composition. The epic opens in a nonchalantly “Floyd-ian” way, with Petrucci’s “glissando” guitar at the center. The opening atmosphere LaBrie finds himself in is downright icy; the guy sings through a stereo chorus echo effect, at times almost in narration, covered by transcendental colors of guitar sounds and piano lines. The track is multilayered Dream Theater from head to toe. Bravura in every respect. As I mentioned: for its exceptional blending of compact motifs, nicely seasoned melodies and multicolored moods that flow into one another without the slightest disturbance. Nowhere do the guys loosen the track up with some drawn-out solos of “sick bickering,” and so they don’t rob it of its consistency. Oh my, oh my! And a flute is thrown in too. Here the guys surprisingly bring John Myung to the front as well, whose bass guitar starts buzzing and rattling through the song somewhere in the middle of the track.
The tracks are diverse. This time we can’t talk about a clear, firm stylistic focus for the band. On the plus side, Dream Theater have put out an exceptionally mature album, and Rhudes’s integration into the band has finally borne real fruit, because the guy plays one of the integral roles in the Dream Theater sound this time. Petrucci no longer showboats with solos, and his guitar sits in the band’s sound constructively and, at last, as an equal. Portnoy is standard, less on the double bass pedal than in the past and more on the cymbals and fills, and James LaBrie, as already said, after the crime he committed on “Train Of Thought,” is burning with his vocals like he hasn’t in a long time. So Dream Theater have finally managed to put out the right combination of everything. A lovely jigsaw of listenable melodies and convincing, multicolored moods, without pretentious solo outbursts, which is why the record has the right “feel” and wins you over. So Dream Theater are slowly becoming maturely refined, which usually settles into a band’s spirit only with the years. All of this keeps Dream Theater as one of the central figures in today’s progressive rock scene in the world of music.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 8.5 / 10
Tracklist:
1. The Root Of All Evil (8:07)
2. The Answer Lies Within (5:26)
3. These Walls (6:59)
4. I Walk Beside You (4:29)
5. Panic Attack (7:16)
6. Never Enough (6:33)
7. Sacrificed Sons (10:42)
8. Octavarium (24:00)
Lineup:
James LaBrie – vocals
Mike Portnoy – drums, backing vocals, percussion
John Petrucci – guitar, backing vocals
John Myung – bass guitar
Jordan Rudess – keyboards, “continuum”, “lap steel guitar”
