easycure

lux, your latest comments leave me with no doubts about who I'm talking to; with all due respect, I really think you need a bit of musical culture. So go listen to Colosseum, Iron Butterfly, Genesis from Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot, Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Magma (actually, no, those last ones are too modern; it's obvious that DT didn't even consider them), Soft Machine, and then Rush, and just for your information, even the ballads of Guns N' Roses, the ones that DT miserably echo in their "stendifica" pieces like The Spirit Carries On... you will have the bleak equation for this band. That this group composed "Images and Words" doesn’t mean anything to me... I don't judge a band based on musical ambition... otherwise, it would just take a bit of technique in ten minutes of song for a band to deserve respect. But that’s simply foolish: one should never lose sight of the substance, the modernity, the WHAT is being proposed... It's exactly for this reason that, I repeat, a band like the Ramones, in its roguishness, has a hundred times the musical value of these smoke sellers... read some writings by Lester Bangs on this, and you'll understand more than in a hundred music magazines that you find today at the newsstand. Obviously, as a consequence of all this, I think your ramblings about "gratuitous disdain" are simply because you don't really know what to respond... and yet I have expressed a few personal opinions to you. How can this be defined as gratuitous disdain? ...hmm...

yes yes, but really yes!

The fact that every album is different from the other is indeed the most blatant proof of their complete lack of personality... which they have desperately sought, never finding it, through years and years of pointless career. Records like "fallinf itno infinity" are pathetic in trying to mimic the atmospheres of the Floyd... let's not even talk about "Train of thoughts," where they desperately try to gain credibility by hardening and speeding up the sound... the latest "Octavarium" is their most honest album, at least... in fact, it's so heterogeneous that it openly shows all their huge limitations, without managing for a moment to escape the usual mediocre aestheticism...

I have never talked about "completely new"... that would be revolution, not originality... unfortunately, originality lies in a different approach on the same foundations, and in this, Dream Theater fail miserably. Their style is entirely referential: they take 30 years of rock history and present it again without any real reinterpretation, with a style that’s never truly such, because there’s no real poetics, no unique expressiveness... it’s the exact same expressiveness of the progressive bands of the '70s filled with some clichés from the following 20 years... not coincidentally, each of them is so bland as a musician (aside from the technique learned through hours and hours of practice) that they have nothing truly personal... they are just 5 interchangeable tourists who could arrange a Pausini album... there is no modernity, there is no innovation, there is nothing. Moreover, I am not particularly concerned that they are "cold" (I don't think I’ve even mentioned that term)... they are simply dull. My aversion, in short, is all too clear, whether you understand it or not, Lux, that’s another matter :-)

Very distant if you stick to the form... the attitude, the poetics have a lot in common... and many Chicago groups (the Slint are from Kentucky, so geographically they fit in just a little) have built their approach on the insights of Slint.

you forgot the Slint...

interesting proposal, North.. I will try

I have always found them likable... their formula is very simple, elementary, yet often not trivial... and they are light years away from the arrogant pride of most Italian "alternative" groups.

The review seems very honest to me. I like these reviews (I've written three or four myself) that take a stand against the dominant narratives in the music media... but you don't explain much why this album should be discarded musically...

Beautiful. In fact, I haven't heard it, but I think Coxon produces a bit too much, when he could produce less but better...