That eamonn guysguy sounds smart.
If you do not normalize, small differecnesdifferences in the mean and/or STD rapidly swamp any shape similarity.
Here is one way to think about it.
If you do not normalize, and the means or STDs are different, then.......
EuclideanDIST(A,B) is approximately equal to DTWdist(A,B), which is approximately equal to [abs(mean(A)-mean(B)) times a constant].
If you can model the similairysimilarity with just the mean, theythen why do you need to even look at the shape?
BTW, you have a cool problem/dataset.