Ants scurrying, coiled up in insect militia overtones, overwhelming and bowdlerising in their duty to silence cries, the shrieking invective standing opposed to clever amalgams of polar terms. That is the imagery adorning the latest collage of musical intrigue from the doyens of prog metal, Dream Theater. An edifice of concrete highway bursting in and out of the frame in every direction, ants roaming upon both the latitudinal and the longitudinal, what curious connotation floats off its sighting?
With Dali and Ballard intertwined beneath the surface, this visual statement is the album name, a grand heap of Systematic Chaos afforded pictorial representation. Regimented ants, a vibrant muddle of incoherence to the human eye, projected on to civilization's own gesture of palpable linearity, the tarmac trails littering the environment, steaming signifiers of mechanical maturity. That is the declaration, control coupled with freneticism, steadiness conjoined to rampant oscillation, ordered certitudes clutched by cyclonic entropy. The turns of phrase spew forth over this overture to the album, already boisterously heralding the opus, full of preemptive deductions concerning what tensions could emerge from chaos systematised, or systems perverted by chaos. Yet, is this not merely a metonymic doodle that typifies the band’s entirety, the virtuosic strains of Berklee College of Music epidemically thrust across constellations of modes and scales?
Naturally it is. Hence, this outing, the first progeny to be delivered by Roadrunner Records, makes for a healthy continuation of trails blazed heretofore, swift indentations cut into the fabric of heavy music, from the erratic instrumentality churned out midway through "Metropolis" to "Learning to Live’s" canonical F Sharp, from the mellifluous legato in "Trial of Tears" to "Dance of Eternity’s" insatiable appetite for time signature changes. Systematic Chaos arrives on a swell of two decades stimulating awe in the heads of musicians everywhere, but what does it offer that hasn’t already been sampled myriad times? What new majesties can the quintet present that might sanction us to put Awake down for five minutes?
Like its predecessor Octavarium, Dream Theater’s newborn consists of eight songs, filling a single compact disc to capacity with ease. While we do get a lengthy epic in the guise of "In The Presence of Enemies", akin to the aforementioned album’s title track, this one is bifurcated, split into two autonomous tracks, one announcing the beginning of the album, the other beckoning us to a close. The reason for this eccentric scission? As Mike Portnoy points out in the Making Of documentary that accompanies the special edition release, with this song the band found themselves blessed with a perfect opener but remained uneasy about throwing such an elongated composition right at the front of proceedings – too high a mountain to clamber over, or something, was the analogy exuded.
Article comments
1 - Tom Johnson
I really enjoy this album, and that's saying a lot because I've pretty much fallen off the DT wagon. It's a far better album than they've released in years - since Scenes, in fact. The last few have been so littered with direct references to other bands that it's just not all that interesting to listen to after you've picked up on them - not that Chaos is free of that, as Muse and Metallica rear their heads once again, but it seems to be to a lesser extent throughout the whole album, whereas Octavarium sounded like they went into the studio and said "We like this song, let's play that and rewrite the lyrics!" I can actually see listening to this album in the future, where the last few just disappeared from my radar.
2 - El Bicho
I will have to give these guys a listen. thanks for the read.
3 - Aaron Fleming
El B's never heard Dream Theater!?! Damn man, that demands a fix, you need to get a good DT sampling on the go. Thanks anyway.
Thanks for chiming in Tom. I know what you mean about the explicit references, seems to be something the band get criticised a fair bit for these days. And I would say that this album is better than the last two (Octavarium & Train of Thought) but wouldn't go as far to say it's the best since Scenes - I'd rank 6 Degrees above it.
4 - Tom Johnson
I'm torn on Six Degree - I like the first disc, but the second disc, which is really the centerpiece of the album, is just so overblown and ridiculous that I actually find it laughably bad. But the first disc, by itself, yeah, in re-thinking it, I might have to agree.
5 - Aaron Fleming
As far as I remember, when I first got the album I was more interested in the first disc, discovering its goodies before moving onto the second one (then again it does have "The Glass Prison" on there, the song that got me into the band initially). But after a while I made an attempt, a few attempts actually, to penetrate the conceptual opus that resides on disc two, and in the end that persistence paid off. Now I would hold the second disc as even better than the first, sure it is overblown in places (first and last tracks especially), but there's parts in there that are as good as any DT material. Perhaps another listen to songs like 'About to Crash' or 'Goodnight Kiss' is in order Tom?
6 - Me
A stellar review... but methinks the average metalhead will be knocked for six with your excessive use of verbiage there, friend. :o)