Year Of Metal #006: Dream Theater - Octavium

We return now to bands I was somewhat aware of in the 2000s, appreciated by my friends but not, at a guess, to my taste. Again I was on the money with Dream Theater’s lengthy, ambitious, conceptual eighth album. As the title would suggest, it’s built around an octave, with each song moving up through the keys. As quirky as that sounds, the weirdest thing about this record is the clutch of conventional, pedestrian, and downright bad songs. 

It starts on a promising note. “The Root Of All Evil” was a swerve from what I expected initially, with its simple riff and unadorned sound, but the complexity mounts as the guitar patterns intensify, and by the halfway point, the rhythm shifts completely. I’m not so keen on the operatic presentation, but the playing’s pretty cool. 

Then we come on to track 2, “The Answer Lies Within”. This isn’t just a soft number, it sounds like a Take That song. It’s a song of affirmations with swelling strings and plinking pianos. It even features the line “you’re gonna shine,” to hammer home the Gary Barlow of it all. It’s never a bad idea to inject some variety into your albums, but is this really what the prog metal crowd are after?

And then there’s “I Walk Beside You”, which might be worse still. The chorus is straight out of the 2000s Bono playbook, rousing to the point of histrionics. It’s somewhere between bad U2 and Bon Jovi. The lame-o strings are back, along with big sugary sweet wordless backing vocals. A brief scan of the internet suggests to me that a decent proportion of Dream Theater aren’t too keen on these tunes, and it doesn’t surprise me - not just because they stink, but because they’re surely not what you’re coming to the dance for.

Thankfully the album gets much, much better from here. “Never Enough” strikes the finest balance between prog and pop for me. If it apes Absolution-era Muse a bit too closely, at least that’s a contemporaneous influence. The chunky riffs are good, and the big brash chorus works a lot better in the Mega-Rock context than it does for the power ballads. 

The album closes on its best two songs. “Sacrificed Sons” is as un-poppy as it gets, primarily instrumental, ripping solos, trade offs, pinch harmonics, all that silly stuff. It might be the best sounding song on the record, with clattering, cascading drums and synths that sound sinister rather than soft. The closing title track is the closest to what I actually expected from the record, a 24 minute long suite that throws everything against the wall. There’s a bucolic acoustics ‘n’ flutes intro; 20 minutes later we’re ending on a triumphant, melodic solo to cap it all off.

Prog’s never been my thing, but listening to Octavarium, a lot of the time what I wanted was more prog. You could whip out the two weird soft tracks and still be comfortably over the hour mark and I’d enjoy the record quite a lot more. You can understand the desire to throw a bone to the casual listener, but Dream Theater don’t strike me as the casual listener kind of band.