Let's figure out Dream Theater.

In which our heroes, former DT drummer Mike Portnoy, Mr. Big's Paul Gilbert, Neal Morse and Mike Bissonette play the Beatles, with fewer strings on their guitars and 1/6 of his Portnoy's usual drum set:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlwMmFZV1XE

Vox ain't bad at least!

Loved the glimpse, in the audition video, of the band's bandanna roadie.
To think that if I'd only practiced a bit harder, all this might have been mine.

That dude's guitar lesson actually seemed pretty chill. I mean, I hate his playing, but he seems like he would be a really good teacher.

Petrucci is a really, really nice guy. All of them are (that I've met - I've never had any interactions with Mike Portnoy, though I heard he was kind of a prick; my dealings have been with Petrucci, Jordan Rudess, Mike Mangini and John Myung).

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/timeline/55ee1d0ebc933b3e1e320fd05d06b544.png

i love those wiki charts

One time in high school, I was in a music store and they were playing something really bitchin, and I walked up to the counter and saw Dream Theater's Images and Words on the 'Now Playing' stand, and so I bought it and took it out to the car and popped it in the cassette deck and realized very quickly that Dream Theater's Images and Words was most assuredly not the album that was 'Now Playing'.

lol! did you go back and figure out what it actually was?

No, this was at a point when my family lived forever away from stuff and before I was driving on my own, and going into town was like a once-a-month thing. I kept listening just to be sure, but by the time my error was confirmed there was no turning back. I tried to pretend that I liked it for a long time.

This was just after I'd discovered the first Pearl Jam album (pre-MTV) in the same way, so I thought I was really onto something.

Damn. The olden days of music-buying were such a gamble.

This band plays too well too much.

their songs are absolute garbage

It's like virtuoso garbage, as if they know how garbage they are but are so good at what they do that they've tried to figure out tricker or more technical ways to be garbage. It's almost academic.

and yet when you add it all up, they've made so many more thousands of people ecstatically happy than most of us ever will

Yeah, can't hate on that. Some people watch car commercials for the music.

no i mean hate on it

but them's the facts

That's why popularity is the worst gauge of quality.

new double album coming in January

these guys are far from my favorite prog-metal stuff but it's weird to me how hard people hate on them. they're like the designate hate-recipients

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdPn1mCmqoE

Just got a good lol from that thread title. Of course nabisco was responsible (missin u boo).

I'm pretty sure I told the story in some other thread where I heard an awesome album playing in a music store when I was maybe a freshman in high school and saw a copy of Images And Words in the 'Now Playing' display on the counter and bought the album straight away and discovered fairly quickly that it was most decidedly not the album that was 'Then Playing' and, because I only had the resources to buy maybe one album a month back then, I gave it multiple listens and really did try for a long time to like it but it just didn't take.

Ever since leaving Roadrunner Records I've found myself saying, almost every time they announce a new release, "Wow - glad I don't have to work on that." I actually liked the last Dream Theater album; the songs were, with one exception, short and melodic and relatively radio-friendly. There was one that was basically (by the band's own admission) a tribute to early '80s Rush, and another where Jordan Rudess's synth sounded like something straight off a Kansas album from 1975. Even the 20-minute epic was kinda good, in its own way. (They had to be almost forcibly talked out of opening the album with it, though.) But a double disc concept album, with the singer playing all different characters in every song? (Check out the special website they've built for it; look at the paintings of the characters.) Seriously, you couldn't get me within a mile of this thing.

I hate music
It's got too many notes

Which is the '80s Rush tribute?

When they get all "emotional" it's like the worst music ever. The crazy pyrotechnic stuff is fun and they seem like cool guys, tho

"but the theory lesson is on the Jordan Rudess online conservatory, and that's a whole different thing. so yeah let's turn on the other planets and see what's going on with this patch!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=F_N87hncAsw#t=295

"this one is called JR AWARENESS."

Which is the '80s Rush tribute?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Looking_Glass_(song)

Love the youtube comments, as always:

Michael Lyle 1 year ago
When did Rush get so hairy? 
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Mircea Filip 1 year ago
Ne-mai-po-me-nit ! Mai ai multe ?
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Asoka Ginting 1 year ago
i cant got the goodness here..
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Antonia Yankova 1 year ago
i can't wait to see them live at the end of the month!
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Jeff Corcoran 1 year ago
DT have never been known for stunning music videos. However, this song is amazing, so I'm completely cool with that :D
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Vitor Boldrin 1 year ago
it sounds like rush's limelight dream theater sucks
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James Rockford 1 year ago
It's like Toto meets Rush
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Dream Theater To Perform Entire The Astonishing Album On North American Tour

The Astonishing: The Performining

feel like watching the drummer auditions video again.. Is there an edited version with just the actual auditions (sand interview)

Lol 'sans interviews'

What a herculean display of abject jackassery.

This is a spectacular sentence.

I like lots of wank but I just can't get with this

Apparently I have gone insane because I enjoyed a lot of the new album when I listened to it just now.

This is pretty hilarious: http://www.dreamtheater.net/theastonishing

that owns imo

the last time i listened to dream theater was METROPOLIS PART II: SCENES FROM A MEMORY which i was into when i was like 15. i've been afraid to relisten to it since

I heard a Dream Theater song on the radio yesterday and thought, OK, I'll hear this out, since I'm not sure I've ever really made it more than a minute or two before. I think it was called "Enemy Inside," and it totally encapsulated everything wrong with this band, which is a lot of things all at once, each individual component wrong in the wrongest way. First was that I heard it on sat. radio's "liquid metal" station, which tends toward extreme metal in all its permutations, from Testament to Gojira. Dream Theater is not metal, let alone extreme metal, it's like they read a book about metal and threw in some signifiers to make themselves seem metal, but then fucked it up by trying too hard. The clean sounding everything, the vocals ... just lame. Second, DT thinks it's some sort of intellectual pop-rock crossover a la Rush, but the lyrics are super stupid, the vocalist super lame, and the playing like guys raised on Rush who thought, you know what Rush was missing? Even more overplaying! And then they just lay on the ultra-technical drums and guitars so thick it sounds like a bunch of guys at Guitar Center showing off at once. Third , they think they're a prog band and not just a bunch of techy guys backing Joe Satriani or whatever. Or, I dunno, butt-stupid flash-rock like Racer X. So just as they throw in some metal stuff, or some poppy hooks, they throw in jarring weird time signature instrumental breakdowns with keyboard solos and shit like that sounds like a parody of prog, minus any sort of vision short number of notes per measure.

Basically, they're just trying too hard, all the time, which is a disaster for players so proficient that nothing is hard.

main crime = boooooooring. there's plenty of prog metal that isn't so....I listen to that.

tho tbh the only prog metal I listen to is Symphony X and Pain of Salvation and the latter have been dull for a decade

But see, I like prog and I like metal and I like prog-metal, and I even like boring, but this ... isn't really any of that. It's more like total cheese a la Trans-Siberian Orchestra crossed with crossover Queensryche crossed with Berklee College jam session or some shit like that. Like if someone came up with an AI script that generated prog-metal and them some other snotty programmer threw in some code for Bon Jovi or something, just to fuck with the results.

what they really need is to get mutt lange to produce them. they'd sound better that way.

Well they couldn't sound worse!

They should get Mutt to write and produce, then get other people to play. And then shelve the album anyway.

I try with them sometimes. I don't hate them but nothing really sticks.

they're just trying too hard, all the time

I tend to feel the same way but a lot of non-moronic people obv really love them. So how do we figure them out? I usually just put it down to not being the right mix of things for my taste, in the way that ELP usually is not, even though I love KC/Yes/Genesis. Kris probably somewhat OTM way upthread.

the object of dream theater is not to write good music. the object of dream theater is for each individual musician to come up with parts that impress those that play the same instrument so that they can sell instructional tapes and make the cover of Modern Drummer/Modern Goatee Keyboardist/Modern 9-string Bass Player/etc. they represent a different ethos of making and listening to music, a technical path with goals that only occasionally align with the traditional taste spectrum. magazines like modern drummer steer people toward this alternate world early on, when they're learning to play instruments. it's possible to get sucked in early and never return. it's kind of like an aspiring young writer who picks up "how to write magazine", and the first article is all about a writer who can cram more syllables into each sentence then ever thought possible. the second article is about how to write the most complicated sentence that technically still includes a subject and predicate, but disguised so that all but the most advanced readers of How to Write Magazine would never be able to identify them. the third article is just about superlong German words. the feature cover article is about someone who converts major works of literature to ascii art and then "speedreads" the ascii art, flipping through images rapidly to finish moby dick even more quickly than ever thought possible. if you sink yourself into this world for a few years at a formative time, these novelties become the main act, and the practitioners become the gurus who point to new (bad) directions because they're the only ones who care enough about the subject to talk about it.

there's a lot of overlap with all of this and marching band, too

every huge fan of dream theater should know that they would also be a huge fan of the Cavaliers Drum and Bugle Corps. i know this because i was a huge fan of both! they straddle the same view of music

Lol I was a subscriber to Guitar magazine when I learned guitar. Petrucci had a column that bored me to tears.

I remember reading the superlative statements made about the G3 tour crowd and being naive and impressionable, thinking "wow, why does nobody talk about these guys?"

And then went for my first voice lesson at a studio that also had guitar teachers and they had one of these things on loop and that (and when I heard Vai's "Bad Horsie") was when I realized it was guitar MUZAK.

It sucks because then people see technique as a bad word since it could lead to that but largely the reason i gave up guitar was cos i felt my enjoyment of it was stunted because of the things i couldn't do that i wanted to be able to do.

My best friend growing up surpassed me fast and he became one of these guys. Listened to Vai, Bela Fleck, boring shit, and it was all he played. He was a brilliant guitarist though.

Lost touch with him at 16. Five years ago, ran into his mother. He's living in CA making beats for rappers.

This is more like athletics than music. The most irritating thing about it all is the contempt that fans of this shit show for any musician who doesn't aspire to the same level of fretboard velocity. Makes me want to play Loiue Louie at them. I mean, the DT guys aren't even very good musicians! No way could any of them play anything funky to save their lives. Then again, they wouldn't want to. They'd see it as 'simplistic'.
Ugh.

the object of dream theater is not to write good music. the object of dream theater is for each individual musician to come up with parts that impress those that play the same instrument so that they can sell instructional tapes and make the cover of Modern Drummer/Modern Goatee Keyboardist/Modern 9-string Bass Player/etc.

I mean I know it's linked upthread somewhere but just to single out this post in particular (one of the best individual posts in all the history of ILX)

John Petrucci brings you...ROCK DISCIPLINE (a picture thread if the pictures can fit)

Based on this review, I can see DT no other way than as described.

Makes me want to play Loiue Louie at them

It's a question I've asked my guitar teacher a few times: do you think Vai, Satriani, et al. could even play "Wild Thing" or Louie Louie" or whatever all the way through? Or would they just kind of start and then put down the guitar, asking "why would I want to do that?" Obviously EVH could, but he was a garage rocker virtuoso, not some clinical tech shred dude. I also wonder if someone like, I dunno, Dream Theater dude ever picks up one of these Most Influential Guitarists lists, sees, I dunno, Johnny Ramone ahead of him, puts on a Ramones album, and is all, huh, don't get it. Then goes back to shredding.