Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10
A concept album is an experience in which some fans love to immerse themselves into and others, arguably with more demands on their time or the relentless march of the quick sound bite has taken its progressive toll on the concentration levels might curse their fortune to have to take in the new Dream Theater album, The Astonishing.
Yet concentration in such things is good for the soul, arguably it improves appreciation for the artist, it offers comprehension for the detail of work that goes into the making of such an epic and there is no doubt that The Astonishing is anything other than epic, a marathon of emotions bundled together, a full plunge into the genre and an offering in which will surely come to be seen in the same light as Queensryche’s Operation Mindcrime or Iron Maiden’s Seventh Son of a Seventh Son in the years to come as a Progressive Metal blockbuster, a completely ambitious album that soars throughout and one that is needs to be heard throughout; the long train journeys or flights abroad suddenly having a great deal of pleasure attached to them.
The album is full of drama, a film, a novel all within the strangeness of the aural delivery, it is the full scale Progressive Opera that causes commotion within the minds of the Progressive fan, the dichotomy that resides within the soul of the Metal lover; that two states of being should nestle deep inside the overtures of what amounts to an opus, an overture of delight that just cannot be turned away from or switched off without the nagging sense of doubt and disillusion of your own inability to focus and muse in the story that unfolds in musical time.
Whilst the album stands out as a whole, it is impossible to ignore certain segments with, just as like it is impossible to listen to The Wall and not get excited about the grasp of Comfortably Numb making its timely appearance, so to in The Astonishing do the sections A Saviour In The Square, Brother Can You Hear It and Losing Faythe offer some extraordinary light in an album blistering with substance and illumination.
The concept album may be hard work in an era when concentration is nimbly quick to flee the scene, yet The Astonishing is worth remembering that music is not a background setting for a computer game, it is the life blood that surrounds us all the time.
Ian D. Hall