THE ASTONISHING

What is it about bands continually going back to the "what if in the future the GOVERNMENT banned ROCK MUSIC" well? Rush did the definitive take on the subject on 2112 and still had a whole side of the record left to do some self-contained songs; Zappa did an exhaustive treatment of it on Joe's Garage; Styx blew themselves up when they tried it on Kilroy Was Here; the Queen jukebox musical adopted it as the plot. It's possibly one of the most overused plots in rock opera, next to "I had a bad childhood and now I have a sad" (hello Tommy, hello The Wall, hello S.F. Sorrow...).

So for Dream Theater to do a two-CD concept album about the idea, running at over two hours... it was always going to be a bit of a hard sell to me. It's just not that clever or original a lyrical concept, and seriously, since the early 1990s rock music (and the less extreme flavours of metal) have been absolutely establishment. If any musical form is about to get banned these days, it's far more likely to be rap or drill music. The mild references to music fading away because mainstream society "has no time for it" would be an original twist... except, oops, the arbiters of popular culture take exactly the same stance in Rush's 2112! Just cover that song if you want to tell that story, lads, it's a banger and you've got the chops to do it justice.

So, lyrically speaking this is worn-out old rubbish, recycling an idea which has already been rehashed far too many times since Rush made bank with it. Musically speaking, on the other hand, it's a bit of a departure. Rather than being produced collaboratively, with all the band members making contributions, John Petrucci and Jordan Rudess went into a room, wrote all the music, and Petrucci knocked out the lyrics (and therefore must take the lion's share of the blame for the crushingly unoriginal concept).

The end result is a rather simpler, smoother take on Dream Theater - there's shimmers of their usual ornate style, but much of it is more straightforward, or dips into more symphonic styles of metal than we're used to hearing from them. It's all rather accessible - to the point where it can be accused of being Falling Into Infinity 2.0.

All that said, I don't think trying something very different from business as usual was a bad idea at this stage. A Dramatic Turn of Events was very much a Business As Usual album, because with Portnoy out and Mangini in the band needed to demonstrate that they weren't about to fall apart. Fine. Then there was their self-titled album, and the whole thing felt a little TOO "business as usual" - it's not that it was bad, but none of it felt special because it was all the sort of thing we've heard from the band a lot.

So in terms of compositional approach and being a two-CD concept album, The Astonishing can't be accused of being business as usual - and sometimes you need to do an exercise like this to shake things up creatively. Even if you go straight back to the old formula, you'll often still find new ways to refine it after this sort of diversion.

What you get here, though, is 2 hours of Dream Theater taking a bit of a break from being the Dream Theater we've gotten used to. It's actually not bad - not Astonishing, despite the title, but not bad. Like many concept albums which botch the concept, it's far more entertaining if you don't even bother to try to follow the story and just let it wash over you. Nonetheless, I'd tend to sit it alongside the preceding album; it's the product of Dream Theater being in a little bit of a creative slump, but whilst the previous album saw them sliding into that fallow patch without changing course, this finds them doing something bold to try and climb out of the rut.

As a result, I think I prefer this one mildly to their self-titled album: they might be flailing a little, but at least some interesting stuff results from it, and you can't really accuse this album of sounding like yet another rehash of A Dramatic Turn of Events. If the idea of Dream Theater applying their cheesiest instincts to a sub-Hunger Games dystopian plotline sounds either entertaining or amusingly bad to you, check it out; otherwise, I wouldn't make this your first port of call in exploring their discography.