This album is not good.In a way it's a shame I don't like it - it's been touted as Dream Theater's heaviest yet, closest to thrash metal, furthest from prog-metal. I like heavy metal; I like crunchy riffs; I don't mind a lack of melody. I saw Dream Theater cover Metallica's Master of Puppets in its entirety at a concert in New York, and it was awe-inspiring. I was hoping they'd take that early-Metallica influence and do something cool with it. Instead, they've come up with their most tedious album since... uh... their last one. Sigh.
Train of Thought is tedious in an entirely different way than Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence was. While it's chock full of similarly forgettable songs, they're forgettable mostly because they consist in large part of tired heavy metal riffs played really fast over. and. over. again. Keyboards play a much lesser role on this album; I never thought I'd miss the presence of Jordan Rudess (for a while I blamed him for Dream Theater's decline into suck-hood), but jesus! Anything to get Petrucci to quit jerking himself off!
So, yeah - Train of Thought is basically devoid of memorable melodies (the ballad "Vacant" is laughable and extraneous); and although it contains a few riffs that are pretty potent, most of them sound recycled and, frankly, dull. And none of them are potent or interesting enough to sustain songs that almost invariably extend to ten exhausting minutes or more.
This review might be a little overly harsh. It just pisses me off that a band I used to like so much, and a band with so much techincal talent, can put out such garbage. I mentioned on a message forum that maybe Dream Theater should just become a Metallica cover band instead of trying to write their own songs. These days, I'd like them much better that way. It's going to take a serious turnaround for these guys ever to get my attention again.
Thank goodness I'm finished with this review, so I don't have to listen to this album ever again.
review by Brandon Wu — 1-31-04 —
