Stoney

Alright, so? You’re saying that on their subsequent albums they’ve recycled the same patterns from the first album, and therefore they’re self-referential, but that’s the lesser evil. Every artist tends to copy themselves, with very few exceptions. What I’m saying, however, is that on I&W they evoke patterns that have already been extensively tested by others over the past 40 years, which seems even worse to me. Take Learning To Live, for example, or the very same Take The Time, those lengthy suites where the only goal is to stuff the cake with as much as possible to convince everyone that they’re good. So, what do those tracks have that’s different from a, I don’t know, The Battle Of Epping Forest (Genesis, Selling England By The Pound)? Nothing but the extreme exaggeration of technical cleanliness and the convoluted attitude of a “mathematical” composition (the album is packed with pieces originally composed in 4/4 to which an additional eighth has been added later, just for kicks, because it’s cool). There’s this widespread belief that a good musician must play complicated "BUT" cleanly, and I&W started this trend of hyper-technical musicians who intentionally complicate their lives just for the sake of making things complex, with lightning-fast solos and twisted time signatures, in an absolutely inconclusive vicious circle, all to prove that they can play anything written on a score, like a computer. But besides being something completely out of the blue (it’s not true that a good musician must play anything, and above all, it doesn’t mean that they have to play it in this way. Moreover, the DT aren’t even capable of playing Metallica covers, despite their supposed technical superiority), the patterns they operate on are the same old ones, already discussed and dissected in works from 30 years prior, just cleaned up, polished, and what’s worse emptied of any minimal meaning, because their function isn’t to say something new, or to just say something, but simply to serve as a callback to past music that is presumed "superior" in the collective imagination. So ultimately, I’m convinced that the entire prog strand created by I&W and Dream Theater is based on a misinterpretation of basic musical concepts, both on their part and on the part of an often superficial audience, who likes to stand out and appear sophisticated but doesn’t have the means to do so, settling instead for something that merely seems like it, and that’s it.

"It not only respects structural canons (classical, mind you) in a clean and aesthetically 'perfect' way." The problem remains: what does "perfect" mean? On what grounds? That’s the crux of my critique. In my opinion, you claim it’s perfect just because it seems so; because the fits, the acrobatic turns, the epic voice, the open and baroque melodies, and above all the clean and aseptic sound of the record give the impression of something perfect, but only the impression. I completely understand what you’re saying, but the experience of 'beauty' you have when listening to Images And Words is not 'absolute' as you say, it is not 'an end in itself' for the love of art: it is forced, imposed, almost 'extracted' from the listener. It is as forced as the television attention imposed through a dancer with her butt hanging out; it is deliberately provocative, and in that case, it’s not you who chooses and becomes aware of the 'beauty,' if there is any, but the image itself slaps you in the face with an immediate, instinctive, easy sensation, the exact opposite of the elaboration and structurality you talk about.

Perfect, we've arrived at the heart of the matter: the "well done" you mentioned earlier. That's exactly the point, in my opinion. It is certainly true that pure aesthetics, the "end in itself," can be art, but then the question is about who can do it and who can't. We said that the DTs "paint" and they do it only to create something that is aesthetically beautiful, and that's fine, but the question is: do they really do this? Surely it's their intention, but do they succeed? In my opinion, they pretend to, but they don't manage it. They strive to show that they do, but in reality, they do nothing. Their pompous and grandiloquent style is smoke and mirrors to make it seem like they are working hard to build something beautiful and structured, but in reality, it is just effort without creation. They give me the same feeling as watching a woman faking an orgasm :DD, that is, screams and a lot of fuss for nothing, and a strong sense of mockery. Because even if I want to do something that's an end in itself, I must use judgment, because no matter how you put it, even the "end in itself" implies a considerable creative effort, and one needs the means to do it. And the fact that they lack those means is evident, for example, when among the pieces they drop absolutely free melodies that only serve to evoke the memory of a certain atmosphere, like the ending of Metropolis (the last verse), for no reason. If there had been another melody there, it would have been the same, just as if the notes in the frantic part right before had been different, because when they composed the piece, they were concerned that there was "a" melody, "a" frantic piece, not "that" melody and "that" frantic piece. I hope I’m making myself clear. Lastly, I would like to clarify the concept of "beautiful" in an aesthetic sense. In my opinion, there is often a tendency to confuse "beautiful" with "romantic," understood as a misinterpretation of the concept of literary romanticism. That is, only what is heart-wrenching is classified as "beautiful" and "elevated"; 9 times out of 10, a piece that talks about unrequited love, or longing, or death, or despair and depression is considered beautiful, and the Dream Theater are masters of these themes both in their lyrics and atmospheres. The entire Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence talks about clinical cases of psychological despair, and not in an interesting way, but by exposing it explicitly to the viewer like clams at the fish market. I will never stop pointing the finger at the ballad where you can hear the "beeps" of the flatline of a dying child’s electrocardiogram, I think it's called Goodnight Kiss, absolutely chilling, the lowest point of their career, in my opinion. When you say that art is also the sense of wonder generated by a Greek urn, you are stating a sacred truth; when you say that an artist is someone who can create common suggestions for humanity, you are making a valid point, but that too is an expressive intent, and anyone aiming to touch such universal chords must have the tools to do so, the intuition, and above all, must understand which signs to use to achieve the same communicative effect on everyone, and that is not easy. With all due respect, I don't believe that the DTs can achieve this; it is far beyond their reach. At most, they manage to bring together those who have the concept of "beautiful - romantic," as I mentioned before, which in my opinion tends to be very superficial and too adolescent to sustain discussions of a universal nature.

@Ktulu, your speech this time is fine. However, we went through 107 comments discussing Schoenberg and hyperuranium, when all I meant at the beginning was "bring a serious critique, talk about the music," and don’t just say "you’re aprioristic," or invite me to be more "moderate" (we’re not in a talk show living room where we have to talk about everything but "without forgetting good manners," which is a very insidious way of saying "don’t take a stance"). You made a statement that finally allows me to say "I agree" or "I disagree," and not just the usual discourse of "you’re aprioristic, you don’t understand anything, the DTs have been influential and you speak badly because you hate them." That said, perhaps we’re getting closer. I mean, for me too, Images And Words aims to "depict," as you say, but what I’m saying is a step further, that when they create that fresco, they do it according to a very personal aesthetic taste, choosing colors based on what they like, and that’s it. If I were to create a fresco where the predominant color is red, to give a silly example, you could come along and tell me "well no, I don’t like it because I personally like green," and that would be the end of it. If discussions about an album were to be reduced to this, then what are we doing here? In my opinion, talking about music means much more; the mistake many make is to stop here and believe that liking or not liking can be the only criteria for judging a work, or using the majority's opinion (since everyone likes it and everyone plays it, then it’s good). And if everyone played it because it was a mass phenomenon whose success is rooted in mechanisms that have nothing to do with understanding music? (see the very mocking discourse I made about fans). I believe that the tastes of most DT fans are coarse; I think that anyone who has a little taste for music and is used to digging deep to understand what a musician is telling them can only find emptiness in the DT albums. @Pixies, I did not mean to compare Roots and Beneath The Remains; I only said that those two albums express something, not that they are the same. They are two different concepts.

They paint me as someone who criticizes metal a priori, but that's not the case. The fact is that very little, if anything, is saved in metal, while 99% is made up of fanaticism and recycled clichés. Because I believe just like you that music serves to communicate feelings and should avoid any kind of schematics; I’m not a block of ice. However, the complete absence of schematics would also be wrong and self-defeating. There are various ways to do this: for example, communicating pathos with the melody of "Through Her Eyes" is trite, superficial. Talking about a dying child using "Another Day," aside from having a perverse aftertaste worthy of an episode of Porta A Porta, is outdated, because the equation "heartbreaking melody = pathos" has been obsolete for two hundred years. There are billions of bands that express or have expressed a whole range of feelings that DT can’t even dream of, and they’ve done it in a much less banal way. Do you like metal? Then "This Love" by Pantera is expressively superior to any whine and any display of technical prowess by DT. As you can see, it’s not necessary to invoke Slint (I mentioned them earlier, ok, I regret it), I took the most idiotic example in the world. If we want to talk about metal again, take "Beneath the Remains" by Sepultura, or "Roots," also by Sepultura. In those records, sound violence is the medium to convey a precise message that is anything but trivial, and which can be understood, in my opinion, with eyes closed. And we’re talking about minimal albums; a child could (perhaps) play the riff of "Roots," but the atmosphere of that album, the evocative tones of the mantras, the offended anger of a people who see their land being taken away after millennia. If someone delves even a little into what Sepultura want to express, they realize that they have the ability to give structured meaning to distorted guitars, frantic rhythms, and growled vocals; in other words, they choose that sound to say something, unlike many other bands that choose that sound simply because "it has to be done." Because a "genre" contains stylistic canons, the "vocabulary" to use, but if you, as a musician, can't use it as a means to say something, then you’re using an empty container. Another band capable of giving a lot of meaning to sounds and structuring them according to a precise dialectical purpose is Meshuggah, in my opinion, and I have extensively discussed this on this site in the appropriate reviews. Here too, the choice of genre comes AFTER you have something to say, or anyway TOGETHER; they influence each other mutually, it’s not an a priori choice like saying "today I’ll dress in red instead of blue," it’s not saying "ok, how do you play metal? Like this? Oh, well, let’s try it." As you can see, I’m not invoking Coltrane or Mozart, and as you can see, I’m not trashing metal "a priori." Of course, if someone listens to Sepultura thinking "oh, how cool, they make a lot of noise," then they are missing part of it, and maybe the next day they’ll listen to, I don’t know, Cannibal Corpse with exactly the same attitude, then they’ll come here on DeBaser to say that it’s me who doesn’t understand shit about music and I’m trashing metal "a priori." I don’t demand the absolute; I demand the bare minimum, which is that a musician should have something to say and the technical-expressive means to do so. @Ktulu. Keats (the poet) died in 1821.

"aesthetic, genius, irregularity, improvisation"? We think alike! But, pray tell, where would the irregularity and improvisation be in DT? Amid their precise aesthetic canons and strict adherence to rules, in pieces crafted to perfection? The pieces of DT are at the antipodes of genius and improvisation! This is the fundamental point of the discussion! So you see that I am right to criticize the fans? Because if you see improvisation in DT, that's your limitation... anyone with even a slight sense of ear doesn't notice any of this in the pieces of DT, nor in this album, for that matter. Sorry, no offense, but this is how I feel.

I ended up saying a "non c" (!?) at one point, the sentence was ending with "what I mean".

Ah... what a struggle, evidently we're just not on the same page, guys :) Pixies, to say that DT has been influential "in metal" is like saying that "in my building" I'm the sexiest man you could meet! And of course, the youngest one here is 65 years old... got the metaphor? I've already written that I've deliberately spoken little about the music of this album, because it would be like shooting at the Red Cross (as someone mentioned earlier). Do you want me to really criticize the music of this album? Well, then the strongest and most enduring criticism of DT is the WHY of their stylistic choices. If we want to talk about the "validity" of a musical product, then there needs to be a reason behind the choices of those who played it, not just the desire to create something aesthetically pleasing, because it’s automatic that a group of 5 musicians from Berklee College is capable of making something beautiful! And that's what DT does: they focus on packaging things in a way that is pleasant to the ear of a listener accustomed to a certain type of sound (so not even a generic listener, but a targeted and very specific audience that has already built its own taste), but their choices make no sense insofar as they express nothing. Listening to a DT album communicates nothing other than the "aesthetic beauty" it consists of, and that's it. It is completely devoid of any meaning or significance, and by meaning, I don’t mean that I want it to communicate a story, a moral: quite the opposite. I’m talking about musical sense, about the significance of the musical phrases that make up their albums. I don’t know if you can understand what I mean, maybe I'm not expressing myself well, but if music is a language it also has a grammar, rules (certainly less strict and freer than those of spoken language, of course, but it has them). A musician, in the final analysis, is someone who "says" something, and to do so he uses signs and symbols structured over millennia of history; he uses them or contradicts them, depending on his intent. And the more valid a group is, the more it can be understood regardless of genre and tastes. Well, DT doesn't do that. I haven't heard a single musical phrase on this album that made me think "hmm, this is interesting," no. Just a sequence of melodies with baroque intentions that aim only to achieve an aesthetic status that listeners already expect, because they are already accustomed to it, their palates are already ready for that kind of taste. They don’t even try to surprise them, only to please them. Sure, there might be some disappointed fans here and there, but you understand what I mean: it’s not that there’s plenty of people who are fine with this, but this is light-years away from saying they are influential and important. Surely they are in a genre of music that has always operated within these parameters, but just an inch outside this environment and all discourse collapses. Because dividing music into genres doesn’t make much sense; music is music, there are albums that are valid regardless of whether they are rock, metal, jazz, or samba. Admitting that a group is influential within just one genre is quite limiting, in my opinion. Bye everyone.

Guys, we are exaggerating here. If I seemed a bit grumpy in the previous comments, it's because I just can't understand how every time someone speaks out against the DT (seriously, this album is really embarrassing, it doesn’t take a degree to get that, come on, you can even listen to it with headphones and headbang, but at least recognize that it's embarrassing... oh well) it gets labeled as "apriorisms." So, you listen to an album, you have your reasons to say "no, it sucks," and then the accusation of "apriorism" comes along, followed by the fan's apologia: "you can't say that, the DT have done a lot of valid stuff, blah blah blah, you're just the usual detractor." As if fans don’t think in terms of apriorisms, right? :D @Pixies77, nice speech of yours, so let me say that according to your reasoning, even Take That were influential because they set the trend that led to the formation of boy bands similar to them in the following decade. My example about boy bands, you see, wasn’t that obvious after all. My "review" pokes fun at the DT phenomenon from the perspective of commercial success, with a strong sarcastic tone, which I don’t understand why bothers you so much. I deliberately chose to say little to nothing about the music of this album because for me, groups like the DT are almost exclusively their success, built on advertising sensationalism: "Oh, Petrucci plays 1000 notes per second, Malmsteen only 999, Petrucci is stronger!" No matter what you say, it's THIS that contributed to their early success and popularity. Then, later on, there was also a "reflective" period when people started saying "no, well, come on, they’re not just machines, they can actually come up with a couple of good melodies." Then... the fact that you came out saying that in the '90s people either played like Pantera or like Dream Theater genuinely makes me smile. There were so many bands and movements within rock back then that a statement like that doesn’t even deserve comments. But no, that can't be said, silence! You have to keep quiet, otherwise, they’ll label you as a know-it-all and "pedantic" :D But the truth is that no one is a know-it-all and no one is pedantic: the truth is that you really don’t care about what those bands were, because you like Dream Theater, Pantera, and who knows who else, and that's enough, you've got your favorite albums and don’t want any more hassle. :) You are perfectly free to feel this way, but I’m not like that, and I can’t just say that the DT are a great band just to avoid upsetting someone or having them wrinkle their nose. The DT are a bunch of "cleaned-up" metalheads who behaved well in school, who tried to go for "refinement" in a genre used to the raw sounds of Metallica and various other bands. From the amazement it generated, great success followed. We know well how myths are created; we live in an age of myths, and I certainly don’t need to explain that to you. That’s how I see it, and it doesn’t seem to me like I'm saying some sort of heresy. Moreover, you all keep saying that I'm angry, that my review is a furious outburst, while it seems to me that the only ones who took it badly are you: I had a lot of laughs when I wrote it. Yes, it’s true that if I think about the success of a band like that, a bit of sadness descends upon me, but I can survive. Well, now I have to go because it's late, best regards.

I hate seeing how empty people's lives are, that when such tragedies happen, they can't believe they can fill their own miserable, useless daily existence with the misfortunes of others. On TV, all these programs are full of politicians, singers, Berlusconi, and pundits who play the victim as if they cared about anything. In the age of appearances, everything counts to seem better; just think about what kind of socio-psychological situation we're in. Apart from those who have always made a living chasing news and easy sensationalism, it's sad to see everyone turning into "beautiful souls" when it suits them. This earthquake in Abruzzo has been a godsend for everyone. Sometimes, it may be good to remember that it was a tragedy EVEN for those who saw their homes collapse on them and now live in tents. What the hell.