DREAM THEATER — Train of Thought (review)

DREAM THEATER — Train of Thought album cover Album · 2003 · Progressive Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
3/5 ·
Phonebook Eater
6/10

“Train Of Thought” is the heaviest, most guitar-driven DT album yet.

There aren’t that many DT fans of exclusively their 00’s period; In these ten years Dream Theater have been trying, especially from 2005 on to 2009, to sound more accessible to a much bigger audience, and they did get a lot more popular. But just before this, they were still interested in writing more challenging music: “Train Of Thought” was probably the last one until 2011’s “A Dramatic Turn Of Events”. Unfortunately, ToT isn’t better than the few albums that will follow it, despite being a little more ambitious.

Overall this is probably the heaviest DT album yet; a rough production, edgy guitars and drums make it that way. This is also the most virtuoso effort of theirs yet; all of the musicians are at the top of their game, they just never sounded better, except maybe for Labrie, who has had a little better moments than here. I hear so many mind-blowing passages, but I do feel sometimes they exaggerate, like they’ll do in 2011 with DToE, especially in Petrucci’s solos, extremely fast and pretty obnoxious too at times. When they try to be melodic, it doesn’t always work, and as always they get pretty cheesy in the hooks. But of course there are many exceptions, and also the cheesiness is compensated with the excellent musicianship.

The three big beasts for me are “As I Am”, a sort of a catchy intro for the album, the instrumental and surprisingly calm (relatively) “Stream Of Consciousness” and “This Dying Soul”, the near twelve minute epic that reprises in a good way some ideas of the previous album, “Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence”. The rest of the songs are pretty good, the best one of these is “Endless Sacrifice”, which has a really good keyboard section in the bridge. But some songs here I just don’t care for: thankfully “Vacant” is a short song, it’s a pretentious ballad with elaborate strings and general orchestral arrangements that just doesn’t do anything for me, and “In The Name Of God” is the fourteen minute ending that has an ok melody, but it’s just way too long, and it does not have an interesting or appealing flow to me.

“Train Of Thought” is a decent album by DT, an album that fans seem to be enjoy by fans, or fans of the single musicians. It can be a little too pretentious at times, but it’s in the end worth your time if you like prog metal.
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