By Metal Child Media
Our Rating : 6/10 [ Good ]
It's easy to be different, but it's not easy to be good. When everybody thought Dream Theater had reached a bottleneck of their creativity, they made a drastic change in their musical style to annoy their ready-customers (metal fans) in a good way. To be honest, they're on the right path now, and it's the right time for Dream Theater to make such a bold move in 2016 regardless of expected criticism from metal purists.
“The Astonishing” is not really that astonishing as titled actually. It’s a concept album that blending ‘70s progressive rock and ‘60s Broadway music elements with Dream Theater’s trademarked style of progressive metal. The piano (keyboards) passages effectively and appropriately linked up everything. Derivative or not is always not an issue to a "safe band" that has been playing “safe music” like Dream Theater, there is no denying that these guys are masters of the genre that they’ve been playing for the past 26 years. You can expect Dream Theater delivering superb sets of combination aforementioned with less aggression and distortion in guitars, more simple-rhythm drums and abundant in mushy-mushy piano melodies will have no problem fitting in at modern pop radios…“ The Astonishing” is so crafty that, combined with the attitude of pleasing both sides (metal fans and rock fans) might pose to a “fire” risk. This half-progressive metal, half-progressive rock, plus, of course a lot of now and then musical elements mentioned delivers from the start until the end that actually has successfully made this a “different” album, and this is also a “better” album compares to their last album “Dream Theater (2013)”.
This is a
good album, big and sweeping melodies with good conceptual arrangement and
production, though the commercialism is so infectious that sounds very
“radio-ready”. The Broadway melodies actually is a credit to make this album
more memorable and avant-garde, so much so that they strengthen the weaker portions of the
album, all shortcomings are overshadowed by their musical strengths ! Dream
Theater made a remarkably sober comeback with their ambition and successful
musical eclecticism. This is their best
album after the loss of Mike Portnoy, and Jordan Rudess has shown a great potential of leading the band into a new musical
direction in the future.
