Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Dream Theater
Label: Atlantic Records
Release: 2005
Rating: 3.5/5
“Octavaruim” is a “progressive Dream Theater-defined” rock album from head to toe, but looking for “Images And Words” (1992) in it is plain silly! We can count ourselves lucky that the wreck unworthy of the band’s name, “Train Of Thought” (2003), is history. The new Dream Theater nowhere go aimlessly nuts with cannon-fire ultrasonic soloing; instead they string together more compact motifs, so the tracks carry a common thread, nothing is fragmented, and in that respect the album is consistent. It’s opened by The Root Of All Evil, which rounds off 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 of sound, with dramatic pre-chorus vocal lines that jump into a chorus of suspicious melodiousness, à la Ana Lee off “Falling Into Infinity” (1995). If “Train Of Thought” was angry metal-ing and you couldn’t even recognize Rhudes on it, on the new record the keyboards contribute a big chunk of the new Dream Theater’s expression. The dreamy The Answer Lies Within and the slightly tougher These Walls (the latter was the promo song that got spun on radio stations before the record came out) are twins, both stylistically and atmospherically, and they completely calm the record down. They’re tender and generally sonically refined, rounded-off wholes with a head and a tail. Technically, though, in terms of innovation and exploration, neither is anything special. The chorus of These Walls alone perhaps brings the band’s old “early nineties” days back to life best. Next up is the pop-rocker I Walk Beside You, the first real surprise on the record. The guitar riff, pushed somewhat into the background like a ticking clock in the pre-chorus, is covered with a lovely contrast in the production by the bass guitar. That’s followed by an easygoing and excellent chorus (LaBrie is phenomenal in it) that sticks in your ear on first listen. This one will probably even go down well with those of you who are nuts about U2.
Then comes a proper prog metal punch with Panic Attack. A modernized, nu-metal-dirty guitar sound covers most of the sonic width, and the track carries brilliant dynamics with the typical, artfully “Dream Theater-esque” 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 change of mood, through a song in which spontaneous motifs flow smoothly and are played, all the way through, with real virtue in a higher gear! The use of sound samples is also new, or what should we call it? The use of “electronic soundscapes”, especially in the intros and outros of songs, something Dream Theater never did before, is a nice enrichment of the band’s expression, because with all the sea of spent notes across their career, Dream Theater desperately need an infusion of freshness, and this is one of the ways that perfectly saves their skin. Never Enough is a song that’s just as thoroughly prog metal, heavy and rolling, and James LaBrie plays an excellent vocal role in it, bringing real drama to the song with his exceptional feel. Sometimes it’s distracting because in the solos it’s hard to tell Petrucci’s guitar sound from the sound of 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 calls to life the “leveling of the twin towers to the ground” in the middle of New York. On the poetry front the band definitely loses seriousness and intellect here, but Dream Theater are, after all, just “proud citizens of USA”, so for peddling this kind of childishness we can only pity them today. The track, which develops lazily at first, is tastefully seasoned with orchestrations throughout. A little before its midpoint the guys get playful and start dangerously demolishing their instrumentarium. Only in this track do we run into the classic crossfire in the solos between Petrucci and Rhudes. The track 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, atmospheric upheavals, and its sense of building a solid composition. The epic opens, quite sloppily, in a “Floyd-ish” way, with Petrucci’s “glissando” guitar in the center. The opening atmosphere LaBrie finds himself in is downright icy, the guy sings through a series of stereo chorus echo effects, at times almost narrating, covered by the 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 merging of compact motifs, nicely seasoned melodies and multicolored moods that flow into each other without the slightest disturbance. The guys nowhere loosen the track up with some drawn-out solos of “sick tit-for-tat” and thus don’t rob it of its consistency. Oh my oh my! And a flute is thrown in too. Here the guys surprisingly let John Myung come to the front as well, whose bass guitar somewhere in the middle of the track starts to buzz and rattle through the song.
The tracks are diverse. This time around we can’t speak of a clear and firm stylistic focus for the band. On the positive side, Dream Theater have produced an exceptionally mature album, Rhudes’s integration into the band has finally somehow borne real fruit, as the guy plays one of the integral roles in the Dream Theater sound this time, Petrucci no longer shows off with solos and his guitar stands constructively and finally as an equal in the band’s expression, Portnoy is standard, less on the double bass pedal than in the past and more on cymbals and toms, and James LaBrie, as already said, after the crime he committed on “Train Of Thought”, is burning it up on vocals like he hasn’t in a long time. So Dream Theater have finally managed to get the right combination of everything out of themselves. A lovely jigsaw puzzle of listenable melodies and convincing multicolored moods, without pretentious solo outbursts, which is why the record carries a real “feel” and convinces. 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 on today’s progressive rock scene in the world of music.
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”
Production
John Petrucci & Mike Portnoy
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)
Album length: 75:46
