I'm not sure if listening to too much Steven Wilson/Alan Parsons-engineered albums recently have made my ears into production snobs, but I cannot bear to listen to this album the whole way through. I can't tell you how many times I've thought to myself "You can do this, no problem, it's really not that bad", pressed play, and turned it off after 2-3 songs. I'm not sure how much blame rests with the music itself but in either case, this album was not engineered well.
And the songs themselves? Actually, I enjoy a couple of them. "Paralyzed", "S2N", and "Room 137" probably crush live, and when the band commits to the huge riffs that Petrucci throws out, it works pretty well. Other than that, nothing very memorable. John Myung's bass tone is loud and muddy, the drums are as cold and flat as cell wall, and James Labrie sounds... odd. Not bad necessarily, just that some of his vocal lines sound strange, like they weren't sure if some of these songs would work better as instrumentals or not, and threw together some quick vocal melodies just in case. "At Wit's End" is also pretty enjoyable, but again, the mix drowning you in guitar while also seemingly never getting louder or any softer for the whole runtime just makes everything blur together - no quiet time means that none of the big crescendo moments land as well as they should. So yeah, a couple of good moments (especially the outro of "S2N", holy shit that's good) amidst a sea of heavily compressed, semi-memorable Dream Theater material.
No comments:
Post a Comment