Surprise, surprise.
It so happens that I've been so distracted by my assorted and sundry stress-induced health ailments—thanks, Corporate, you heartless bitch—that I had no idea whatsoever that Dream Theater was putting out a new album, timing its release to absolute perfection by selecting the very day that I am doomed to return to my desk job from the sanctified alpine vistas of Wyoming.
You know when I discovered that, I had to have me that first release off of the new album for my travels!
I have a fairly long fixation on Dream Theater, though I've not yet managed to see them in concert. I believe the album of theirs which I first purchased was the mainstream offering, Images and Words; this, for those of you imaginary souls who may be tragically uninitiated to the delicious world of alternative metal and yet are still trudging along through this scary forest of obsessive/compulsive metal veneration, is the album that spawned the "Pull Me Under" single.
From that modest beginning, I rapidly collected more Dream Theater albums, though I was at a loss to explain the appeal until I noticed, at a Rush concert, a significant number of attendees sporting Dream Theater shirts. Upon returning home and exercising my right to Google, I read a number of analyses that smartly compared Rush and Dream Theater, with their tendency to switch key and alternate beat, explaining that the two bands shared a tenacious appeal to the attention-deficit-disordered.
Basically, the suggestion was that there is so much contained with Rush and Dream Theater songs, that people who might otherwise be bored with music, cannot become so—making them supermagnetically attracted to the two bands. Between the two, of course, Dream Theater has a heavier edge, but the similarities are nevertheless many.
Anyway, while I am not at all the sort of person who holds court on musical discussion boards—being that I tend to slouch down in the corner with the rest of the slovenly and "musically illiterate", despite the fact that I am very vocal in my personal musical preferences ... I simply cannot defend them in terms utilized by the musical elite—I am nevertheless a fairly rabid Dream Theater fan. To me, their lyrics provoke thought, their melodies incite chills, and their stylings demand repeated play—all of which I am deliriously pleased to provide.
There will be argument and debate, of course—there always is, even amongst the most devoted of fans—regarding the quality and innovativeness of Dream Theater's newest production. However, regardless of whether the experts or the laymen or the random listener concur on the merits (or lack thereof) of this latest effort from Dream Theater, I've already made my assessment of the first fledged track. I have all I need to know in what I've read into the lyrics and what I've extracted from the surging trills and crescendoing plunges, and I like it. I like it rather a lot, particularly when the refrain speaks to me so abundantly and appropriately:
Turn the key
walk through the gate
The great ascent
to reach a higher state
A rite of passage
The final stage
a sacred home
Unlock the door
and lay the cornerstone
A rite of passage
There's some sort of of cliché about how you find what you're looking for ... I believe it's made out to be a bad thing, and certainly it can be. But in regards to something as personal as music, if you find what you're looking for, then you've done a damn fine job as a seeker. And part of the beauty of music is that there is so much more to it than its simple literal and tonal speech—music also has in it what you bring to it.
So bring a lot, my invisible friends ... and bring it often.
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