When a band first starts writing in the beginning of their career, they've drawn from the years of listening to all the musical influences that came before them, and if they're good at combining all those various styles, they come out with something that is totally fresh, unique, and their own.
Portnoy was always the guy in the band turning the others onto new bands. I remember JP relating how Mike had turned him onto this new band Muse. A few albums later, they got accused of ripping them off on a few songs. Okay...
Sometime after that, I recall an interview where one of them said they don't listen to any outside music any more. Either leading up to, or during their writing sessions, whatever it was.
My theory..., if you do that, you know, stop allowing yourself to continue to draw from other music sources, to help contribute to keeping your own sounds fresh, your music is going to start sounding the same, and even stagnate. And you can stop growing. There's only so much "internal imagination" one or 2 songwriters can have in their own 'well', so to speak, especially after being together for 40-plus years.
Couple that with losing Portnoy, and you've got a string of albums that, like them or not, have definitely lost some of that originality, and/or uniqueness. Most DT fans don't care for the more recent albums as much as the older ones, if internet comments are any indicator.
The album is done, so it's all moot at this point. But I really hope there's more imaginative music on the rest of the tracks.
And I'll probably get closer to my initial reaction, the more I listen to it. But I never had to do that for songs like New Millenium, The Root Of All Evil, Trial of Tears, Stream of Consciousness, Home, Erotomania, In The Presence of Enemies, Metropolis, Beyond This Life, etc. Those songs (and many more I could've added) grabbed me right from the first listen.
