"Octavarium" starts off almost orchestral and has a beautiful build up. The song does kick up a little before it dies down and enters the first of five lyrical movements. This first one is subtitled "Someone Like Him" and tells the story of someone who wishes to not be an ordinary person and succeeds, but he looks back and wishes that he was an average person instead. It is a beautiful part of the song and it has some nice soft vocals from James LaBrie. The vocals don't stay soft though and they kick up when James sings "As far as I could tell" and it drops again.
Each movement starts with an instrumental solo and each one is beautiful, from the opening lap steel guitar solo to the elastic sounding bass in the second part. This second part is called "Medicate (Awakening)" and also tells a story, and is the last movement that tells a coherent story that reflects the theme of the song. This was also the only movement written by James LaBrie himself, where the other movements were written by John Petrucci and Mike Portnoy, the guitarist and drummer of the band respectively.
My favourite movement is definitely the third movement as it is Mike Portnoy's ode to progressive rock and it really shows. There are many references within the song to other songs and bands including Genesis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, The Doors and Yes. The movement is called "Full Circle" and is in reference to the bridge it has where it is the final line of it. This is also the last movement to have this kind of bridge, the other being "Medicate (Awakening)". This movement also feels more lively than the last two and adds to the build up of the song as it transitions perfectly into the next movement "Intervals".
Although "Full Circle" is my favourite movement of the song, "Intervals" may have my favourite part of the song. It is when the movement is almost finished and James is just repeating the line "Trapped inside this octavarium." However, each time he says it, he puts more strain on his vocals and the last time he says it, the music cuts out during the word "This" and pretty much explodes at the end, creating a nice piece of falling action and transitioning to the final movement "Razor's Edge".
The whole song's theme is that everything comes around full circle, the story ends where it begins, we are born in a hospital, we die in a hospital. "Razor's Edge" is where the message really sinks in as it ends as soft and as slow as the opening movement. It does lose some points with subtlety as the last lines of the song are "This story ends where it began" but the ending instrumentals add much to the song as they are also a reference to the album as a whole, being the same note that the album's first song "The Root of All Evil" started with.
To me, there is no other perfect song than this. I have been feeling that in looking at songs I don't like, I'm really not doing my passion any justice. It's songs like this, and bands like Dream Theater, Pink Floyd, System of a Down, Gotye and Megadeth that I love music, and I feel like I should look at the songs I like as well as songs I don't like. I should look at why songs don't work as well as songs that do work and why they work as well as songs that aren't known as much about as others.
I'm the Entity of Darkness and this has been Ace Audio.
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