SUSPENDED ANIMATION

Suspended Animation is a really great album, but after a few listenings I've found three weak points in it. The first one of them is that the album lacks any degree of originality. Half of this album is undistinguishable from any other Dream Theater album, while the other half y made up of songs that seam to be taken from inside the mind of Joe Satriani. I think that anyone whose work is compared to DT and Satriani should feel utterly flattered, especially when creating an instrumental and progressive record, but I think that we can ask a little bit more to a person like Petrucci. Jaws of life has an impressive resemblance to the music of Train of Thought, while Wishful thinking and Tunnel vision seam as thought they are being played by Satch's fingers. Even more, Damage control even makes me remember the song Bad horsie from Steve Vai. In conclusion, in spite being a wonderful work, the record does not achieve the standard of a truly original creation, basically copying the structure of the two genres that it attempts to emulate. The second criticism is that the record does not have a single direction, it is as though progressive metal would have tied up the left hemisphere of John's brain, while instrumental rock have done the same with his right hemisphere, both struggling to take control of his creativity. It is for this reason that the album lacks coherence, the songs doesn't seem to have a single creator, and the record can't show itself as a single and concise piece. And the last one is that Petrucci seems to be running out of new ideas. His compositions are starting to lack his innovative side which was such an important characteristic in his early work. He has exploited those riffs made up of exotic scale to the point of making them undistinguishable from each other. But don't get me wrong, this is an excellent instrumental rock album, way up among the best ever created. And this is because Petrucci is not just a person who has exercised his fingers for hours each day, he has also done it with his head, and he has dedicated a lot of his time to think the guitar as a serious instrument and not as just as a machine to work out. I dear all of you who criticise this huge musician saying that he is the stereotype of a technical virtuoso to thoroughly study his music and realise that his work goes way deeper. 4 stars to this album. The critics are superficial, the work isn't.