Of all the commentary on the new Dream Theater album, take a look at this excerpt which makes me speculate that maybe not everyone in the band was totally on board with this dumb idea of an album:

The Astonishing is replete with filler tracks, songs that really have no right existing other than as obscure parts they play in this (rather underwhelming) story that the album attempts to tell. And that’s not enough: cliche guitar parts mix with over-sweetness in LaBrie’s voice and bounce off the most cliche lines that Rudess can make from his keyboards.

And they’re repetitive as well. There’s no reason for “Act of Faythe”, one of the cheesiest songs ever made by Dream Theater, to exist when a track like “The Answer” exists as well. There’s supposedly a common theme being iterated upon here but it’s not interesting enough to carry the tracks forward. Nor are the ways in which the band iterate upon it interesting in anyway: they include shifting the mood just a bit to give it a lighter or darker spin and nothing else.

All of these flaws extend to the second “CD” as well, and then some. “A Life Left Behind” for example is a track which could have come right out of Awake but it’s successor, “Ravenskill” is completely pointless, taking too much time with its intro and failing to deliver when the main theme is introduced. Since the flow between the tracks, a famous trope of progressive records, has been completely abandoned here in favor of the “track by track” structure of rock operas, the second CD is hard to pin down and connect to the first.

By the time you’ve reached it, so many filler tracks have gone by without a clear approach to thematization that the thread is almost impossible to grasp. The narrative has been completely lost and every track, even the good ones, start to sound the same. That’s no accident: even the good tricks utilized on this album are the same old tricks that we know from this album itself and from past entries in the Dream Theater discography. While the overall style of the album is new, in that it taps into tropes that were only lightly present in their careers so far, the track progression is the same tried and true method.

OK, we’ve saved the best (worst) for last. Sharp-eyed readers might have noticed that we haven’t mentioned two current members of the band. The first, John Myung, might not surprise anybody; his absence, both in sound and words, from the band is a thing of legend by now. On The Astonishing, or at least on the copy that we of the press received, he is almost 100% missing. Whether in the mixing or in the recording, the bass was completely swallowed by the other instruments and is completely absent from the final product.

However, now we come, here at the end, to the most egregious and unexplainable flaw in this record: Mike Mangini. Throughout the album, Magini displays an almost impressive amount of disinterest in what’s going on around him. The drums line are not only performed in a lackluster way, they also sound as if zero effort was put into their writing. We know Mangini is a talented drummer but that talent is nowhere to be found here: obvious fill after obvious fill churn out under paper thin cymbals and pointless kick drums, ultimately amounting to nothing much. There’s literally no moments on the albums that are worth mentioning for their drums and this infuriatingly frustrating, given what we know of his obvious ability.

At the end of the day, when you put all of the above together, you get a disappointing album. If this had just been a bad album, we could have chalked it down to age, momentum and being out of touch. That’s impossible though, since when the album is good, it’s really quite good. If only it had been cut to about ten tracks and purged of the incessant repetitions, it might have been the best Dream Theater album in years. Instead, it’s a puerile attempt at a grand gesture that ultimately falls on its face, caught too close to the sun with wax spilling over, giving all its features the same, bland, indecipherable structure.

I don’t know how much to make of this. Aren’t there, like, only about two decent guitar solos on the whole double album (and, even so, ruined by the mix)?

I think, rather, that any absence of quality on the album is simply due to DT’s incompetent foray into the genre of musical theater.

Calling all prog fans of the solar federation: steer clear of this stinker of an album.

WARNING: It is not a prog album.

Sure, there’s about 1 minute and 30 seconds of prog at the end of “The Gift of Music” (the last 30 seconds being the best), and a smattering of tiny prog tidbits on about a half dozen other songs (with only “A New Beginning” [7:41] having any claim to being a prog song). But more than anything else what we have on this putrid, bloated failure is: wall-to-wall cheesy ballads.

The whole thing is tied together by a ludicrous story, poorly written, with moronic characters nobody could ever care about. The heavy-handed lyrics are among the worst lyrics ever written. Ever. I lost count of how many times I heard LaBrie singing about “the light inside of me,” and other such nauseating cliches.

When the histrionic crying started on “Losing Faythe,” after one and a half hours of listening to this wretched album, I simply had to laugh out loud. I pictured Dream Theater fans similarly weeping over their purchase of this colossal pile of crap.

How do I arrive at these judgments? Easy. I simply compare The Astonishing to all the accomplished works in the same genre that DT has chosen for this album. And sorry, this album just doesn’t stack up. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is going to be singing show tunes from this album at the local Glee club. The songs are so bad, no one ever would.

Go listen to Wicked, or The Last Five Years, or Hamilton, if you want to see what DT, in its hubris, has recklessly invited comparison to. Compare the wit and songwriting skill on such efforts to the total absence of any such merits on this. Heck, go compare The Astonishing to High School Musical and Frozen. Guess what? DT absolutely sucks in comparison. Are you really surprised? No, I’m not. They should have stuck with prog. Because if you want to take on the likes of Idina Menzel, you better bring it. And DT simply fails to deliver. The songs suck. I don’t care how good they are as musicians. They are total songwriting failures by Broadway’s standards. Not even “Hymn of a Thousand Voices” succeeds.

Maybe you think my comparisons are unfair. Okay, go compare this album to Chess, written by the dudes from ABBA. Chess totally works as awesome music theater; this album, however, is a stinkingly bad failure of epic proportions.

Don’t waste your time listening to this album. I did, and every time I wasted those two hours, I thought afterwards: that was time I could have better used to listen to the great new albums by Headspace and The Mute Gods. (Headspace especially. Now there’s a prog album that generously rewards every second of your time!)

Here’s all you need to do if you doubt my thesis: go listen to the closing track, “The Astonishing.” DT packs everything that sucks about this album into one track: the terrible, cheesy lyrics; the sappy, crappy ballad songwriting; and the total failure to deliver any kind of hummable, memorable musical experience. Barf! This stinkaroo of a song is soooo bad!

It sure ain’t no “Grand Finale” of 2112, which their dopey sci-fi scenario immediately invites us to conjure up in comparison. Beginning, middle, end: DT’s blown all of it. We couldn’t even edit this album down to 21:12 minutes of good stuff. Not even then would it stack up favorably to Rush.

What good is being in a band if no one will speak up and say, “Hey guys, this is a really bad idea”? Apparently, no one did. So it’s up to us: let’s make like Mike Portnoy and run the hell away from Dream Theater’s bad choices. Their stinking deuce of an attempt at writing a musical on The Astonishing is nothing short of a musical nightmare.