Thoughts on the New Dream Theater Single

The concept of singles seems wonderfully archaic to me, but at the very least it allows me to hear a track from the new Dream Theater album a little ahead of schedule. The track - "A Rite of Passage" - is supposedly available for download from Roadrunner, although good luck with getting traction on their underpowered servers. If you don't get through by midnight tonight, they'll have a streaming version up tomorrow. My thoughts:

• My first thought: "interesting." But I always think that about everything Dream Theater puts out and then I end up liking it.
  
• There's something about the production on this song that sounds different from what Dream Theater has been doing on their past few albums: the guitar in particular sounds a lot more vibrant. Either they're compressing things differently, or they've cut down on the number of tracks. The guitar parts also sound a lot more thrashy than they've been in a long time.
  
• The chorus has a strong enough hook to stay with me for a while after I first listened to it. Could be I was right about this being a more melodic album.
  
• Remember how I thought "A Rite of Passage" might be the next twelve step song? Unless joining a mysterious quasi-religious organization is one of the steps, I was dead wrong. Instead, this song has one of Dream Theater's more transparent lyric lines: the entire thing is about Freemasonry. So far, I can't tell if the band is for or against the concept. Possibly - "The Great Debate"-style - they're going for both angles.