The Big Dream Theater Retrospective
Intro
I have been listening to Dream Theater for around 15 years. I’m pretty sure that qualifies me as a fan.
They are just about to release their 16th studio album and it occurred to me that this would be a good chance to write down my opinions on their previous 15 albums.[1]
If you don’t know who Dream Theater are, they are a progressive metal band, if not the progressive metal band. If you enjoy complexity, maximalism and metal with clean vocals they are most probably the band for you.
With Dream Theater you can be sure that you will always get the maximum amount of music per song in every sense of the word.
They currently are, and have been for the majority of the group's existence, John Petrucci (guitar), John Myung (bass), James laBrie (singer), Mike Portnoy (drums) and Jordan Rudess (keyboard).
They have been active for 40 years and have covered a lot of ground during that time[2]. And being a progressive metal band, it would be strange if they didn’t progress into very weird territory at points.
I don't know much about music theory, so expect a lot of outlandish and chaotic descriptions whenever I attempt to express what I think Dream Theater might be doing in their songs.
I won’t write a track for track breakdown of each album or go into super detailed summaries or interpretations of lyrics[3] unless something really stuck out to me.
It’s more about the general impression an album left on me, and how it influenced my understanding of the band and what their work.
Somehow I overlooked that this would still be a lot of writing and now I’m committed to this monster post of over 16,000 words. If you can make it to the end, maybe there will be a cookie or something.
I’m not even sure who this post is for exactly. If you’re already a Dream Theater fan, you will probably have heard many of these takes and critiques before.[4] And if you’re not a Dream Theater fan you might just get very confused, because this band does a lot of strange and ambitious things that will probably seem quite silly and abstruse when described in writing.
But let’s get into it.
When Dream and Day Unite (1989)
I know this is not the most exciting way to begin this post, but I don’t really care for this album and rarely listen to it. It’s an awkward start (with equally awkward cover art) before the band figured out their style.
The production is subpar. The vocals by Charlie Dominici, whose name still lives on in the design of the band’s logo, leave much to be desired. There are many moments that could be seen as seeds of future accomplishments, but why listen to that if you could instead listen to any of the later albums where they come to fruition?
When Dream Theater released their 11-Disc studio album box set in 2012, When Dream and Day Unite was omitted. As I understand this was due to licensing problems but still, the fact that they went ahead with the set without it is saying something and I don’t think anyone especially missed it.
In summary, it’s just not a Dream Theater album to me, it’s a Majesty[5] album. And I would rate it as merely okay.
Images and Words (1992)
All the good stuff starts here, in fact, this album is so good that few other entries in Dream Theater’s discography even come close.
Even many decades later this is still the definitive Dream Theater album, and to many it is also the definitive prog metal album in general.
We could begin with discussing Pull Me Under, the band’s one and only mainstream hit, but that doesn’t feel right.
As usual, mainstream popularity does not necessarily match fandom perception and the highlight of the album for many fans, the song which really exemplifies what Dream Theater is all about, would be Metropolis Part 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper. It’s an amazing song that keeps you on the edge of your seat for the entirety of its nine-minute runtime.
The structure is bonkers. There’s not even a refrain but there is a flow to it, just one that continues shifting and mutating. James LaBrie’s voice goes to a lot of impressively high and strange places, but the instrumental sections steal the show. It’s not just about the solos, there aren’t actually that many in the song, but more about how the different band members play off each other in all those strange combinations, passing motifs and melodies back and forth between each other, sometimes mirroring, sometimes contrasting while the song seems to increasingly dissect itself until everything is brought to the edge of dissonance and chaos, yet in a very systematic way and when the harmonies reassemble themselves the song arrives at a slightly altered version of the melody that the section started with, perhaps symbolizing some sort of rebirth, or whatever is going on with the bizarre and evocative symbolism making up the lyrics.
It’s almost too much to take in at once, but that’s the Dream Theater experience. Their top songs are prog extravaganzas layered with more musical antics than I could articulate. Music you can listen to on repeat and always find something new.
With that out of the way, now we can talk about Pull Me Under, the opening track and greatest hit. The irony is, of course, that for dream theater standards the track is on the lower end of progressive[6], the time signatures are nothing too bizarre, it’s mostly structured like a regular song, there’s just more of it.
But even the song’s detractors probably wouldn’t dare to argue that the main riff isn’t downright mesmerizing. Everything about the song is a genuine earworm except that’s not really what the band wanted to focus on generally. It also contains some of the catchiest lyrics Dream Theater has ever written.
Speaking of that…
Let’s talk lyrics
I don’t think anyone listens to Dream Theater exclusively for the lyrics. And I can’t honestly fault people for whom lyrics are the main part of the listening experience[7] for not getting into this band. My general impression of Dream Theater lyrics is that at best, they’re good and at worst they’re weird cheese.
The details are tricky to put into words. Song lyrics are closely related to poetry which isn’t my area of expertise.[8] This occasionally makes me feel unqualified to critique the band’s lyrics at all ...but I will anyway because, structural properties aside, I think there’s an argument about the nature of good writing in general that still applies here: Good writing should convey something authentic[9] in a new and unpredictable way. It should make you say: “Of course that makes sense but I would have never thought to put it that way!”
Novelty is key when it comes to established themes. The idea that being in love or being heartbroken are big authentic feelings is correct but that doesn’t make the 500th love ballad expressing that exact thing any less boring. It’s not interesting or insightful to just state something everyone already knows.
On the other hand, if a band were to make a song about something weird and niche like for example some debate about stem cell research then this purely hypothetical band would not be under as much pressure to do anything super innovative or creative with that. The lack of songs on the subject make the topic interesting and novel on its own, so why not be direct?
This trade-off is important because on the other side of the writing scale you have songs and songwriters that try way too hard to make their themes feel deep and unique for the sake of it, leading to awkward wording, nonsensical mixed metaphors and generally the lyrics equivalent of over-the-top purple prose.
And where does Dream Theater fall here? All over the place, depending on the album and even the song. Anything goes, that’s part of the charm.
Images and Words is clearly in the more purple prose-ish side, an approach best described as “big and grandiose words for big and grandiose music”.
Definite meaning takes a backseat. Who knows what Under a Glass Moon, Metropolis[10] or Sorrounded are actually about? Even the half-Shakespearean half existential musings of Pull Me Under are more about the sentiment than about anything specific. That doesn’t mean the songs are bad, because the aforementioned grandiosity works, it perfectly matches the energy of the music, its tempest of exuberant sounds feels very at home with all the baffling and dense metaphors employed in the lyrics.
There is, however, something lyrics related that I have some problems with: With Take the Time and (parts of) Learning to Live we encounter the first example of what I like to call “self-help metal”, a style of writing that I do not care for in the least.
Self-help metal is any song which claims to be about a big and important sounding topic like life and love, or the human soul, without having anything to say about it beside some version of “trust in love”, “follow your dreams”, “don’t give up” etc. It’s the sort of wishy-washy positivity that you find in random self-help books that get (self) published on amazon or on motivational posters. And like those books and posters they rarely offer any constructive approach to those issues nor any creative and unique perspective, only platitudes dressed up as philosophy.[11]
I don’t see myself as a cynic and I don’t actually disagree with love and hope being important things and whatnot, but that’s also what makes it boring; stringing together a bunch of vague truisms that anyone would instinctively agree with feels like art going for the low-hanging fruit. Unfortunately Dream Theater does this a lot when they try to seem philosophical, so this will be somewhat of a recurring criticism.
Vapid lyrics aside, Take the Time was one of my favorite Dream Theater songs for a long time. I still can’t wrap my head around how smoothly the bombastic symphonic metal intro transitions into the groovy almost jazz-like vocal section for instance. I listened to it so much I just got sick of it after a while.
The album is filled with amazing moments, be it the emotional catharsis of Surrounded or Wait for Sleep, or Under a Glass Moon’s face melting guitar solo, but I don’t want to go on gushing about it for too long, so let’s end this section with the observation that it’s an excellent album.
Awake (1994)
Following up a release like Images and Words must have meant a lot of pressure which makes it very interesting that Awake manages to avoid even seeming like it was trying to recapture the same mood. Obviously, the complexity is still there and it’s not as if there are no catchy melodies but the sound is heavy and the themes are bleak. This is not for the mainstream radio audiences.
Images and Words could be intense, yet it was rarely dark. Awake trades the self-confident lyricism for (mostly) more specific themes of the less cheerful variation such as stress, abuse, betrayal, disillusionment, etc., with only Lifting Shadows Off a Dream having a more hopeful outlook (and even this song is still drenched in melancholy).
The tonal shift is also represented in the album’s cover; in comparison to Images and Words most of the warmth and saturated colors seem sucked right out.
Out of all the songs in Awake my favorites are 6:00 and Voices although there is really no track that’s actually bad.
6:00 is just the perfect album opener. The iconic drum intro leads into keyboard and riffing section that is already far more aggressive than most of Images and Words, and the same goes for both the contents and the delivery of the lyrics.
It’s a song about stress and being crushed under responsibilities that seem to stretch on forever and the main musical theme and rhythm of the song does a neat thing that I can’t exactly describe, where it sounds like the beat is almost interrupting itself but somehow still keeps the flow going. It’s unnerving, which is no doubt intended.
Now Voices is technically part of the A Mind Beside Itself suite together with Erotomania and The Silent Man, so although we have a longer song on the album with Scarred, I consider Voices to be the true epic because it’s the one telling the more varied story. It’s a nightmarish tapestry elaborately woven with themes of madness, religious fanaticism, abuse and sexual repression. Is it all laid on a bit thick? Sure, but as a part of the suite, it's nicely balanced out by being followed by the comparably somber and less dramatic piece The Silent Man.
Another standout song, Lie, goes for full-on heaviness from the very first second. It’s all drive, all rhythm, the aggression is relentless and the shrill synth howl that Kevin Moore produces on the keyboard for much of the song creates an incredibly tense atmosphere that only lifts for a single moment of melodic relaxation that comes in very suddenly at 5:14, and even then the lead guitar remains sharp and distorted and the solo takes the intensity all the way up again before the sudden end.
And we have Space-Dye Vest, possibly the least Dream Theater song on any of their albums. Like most tracks on Awake it’s rather bleak but that bleakness is communicated in a subdued and simmering way in place of the typical heaviness. Written by Kevin Moore, the keyboard is the center of the composition, instead of the usual guitar focus.
What makes the song lyrically interesting is that, while occasionally seeming like your standard “sad guy with broken heart” sob story, much of the song, especially the part presented via voice samples, tells a different story entirely.
My reading of the song is that it follows a young woman who escaped from a bad relationship, and while she attempts and struggles to live an independent life, we are also following the thoughts of her partner as the breakdown of their relationship drives him into depression and isolation. What’s important is that although the man is singing the main part, the song as a whole isn’t even necessarily sympathetic to him, perhaps even antagonistic. And that’s just an interesting twist on an already very effective song.
Speaking of Kevin Moore, this album is notably the one he had the most influence over[12] as well as the album after which he left the band. The use of spoken word samples is one particular stylistic technique that is used especially overtly on Awake, becoming much rarer after Moore’s departure (although it still pops up occasionally), providing another unique facet that makes the record stand out from the rest of the discography.
It has also been recognized that much of the melancholy and rage suffusing the album was just Moore getting really fed up with the rest of the band and venting his displeasure before finally leaving.
Generally, I don’t think the “suffering artist” archetype is a good measurement of art but if the emotional vividness of a pissed-off keyboardist made the album the unique and captivating experience that it is, well, I will take that. Either way, it’s another excellent album.
A Change of Seasons (1995)
I love A Change of Seasons (the song) so much that I have to list it here, even though it’s not actually an album. It’s more of a single released as an EP that’s as long as an album.
The eponymous song is the centerpiece, a 23-minute prog masterpiece that was the band’s first foray into writing long form epics, and at least in my opinion, it’s still one of their best.
But because the track wouldn’t have fit on the next album and they didn’t want to release “just” a single, the band decided to release it as an EP for which they threw together a bunch of covers and live performances simply as padding.
Maybe that was just what bands did back in the days of a CD focused music industry. However, I wonder if this was the right choice. I’ve seen plenty reviews get hung up on the comparatively unimpressive live and cover parts and giving the CD lower ratings for it, so I can’t help feeling like this strategy tarnished the song by association, at least at the time of release.
I’m not even going to talk about any songs besides A Change of Seasons. They are okay, I don’t really care.
But let’s get into the song itself: Compared to some of the later “epics” A Change of Seasons may not be as ambitious and polished (there are a few awkward transitions between different sections for instance) but its classic coming-of-age narrative, starting with the bliss and later loss of innocence and culminating in regaining a sense of peace later in life, carries an impression of earnestness and vulnerability that few other songs share. It’s simple yet very effective.
And it sounds fantastic as well. The emotional build-up in Carpe Diem, the killer riff in The Darkest of Winters, the slowly intensifying solo making up much of The Inevitable Summer, followed by one of the most energetic keyboard parts of Derek Sherinian’s short stay in the band… these could probably all elevate a song to greatness all by themselves and put together the result is just incredible.
Plus the fascination with the cycle of generations can be seen as prefiguring the cyclical themes more explicitly elaborated upon in Octavarium, another long-form composition and basically the magnum opus of mid 2000s Dream Theater (but we’ll get to that later).
Anyway, A Change of Seasons is a highlight of the band’s early era, and one of the songs that got me into their music. And if I wanted to get someone new into Dream Theater, this would be part of my introductory selection besides Images and Words.[13]
Falling into Infinity (1997)
Even if this is a boring mainstream opinion nowadays, I don’t think this album measures up to the rest of the discography at all and fully deserves its statuts as the black sheep.
Falling into Infinity contains some of the band’s most embarrassing missteps; the less is said about the nu-metal style semi-rapping on Let Me Breathe, or the weird lead sound in You Not Me that sounds like a doorbell (and all the other bizarre things in this song), the better.
And even if it was totally the band’s decision[14] to go with a less heavy sound and less progressive bells and whistles this time around, it’s just an experiment with overall mixed results.
Especially when the lighter style doesn’t match the subject matter; I am thinking here of Peruvian Skies, a song dealing with child abuse and by far the darkest track on the album thematically. Just going by the lyrics you would expect the sound to be harsh and oppressive but in reality the song sounds positively chipper most of the time, particularly when compared to anything on Awake. It’s weird.
This is also the only full-length album with Derek Sherinian at the keyboard. Compared to previous records, Sherinian’s style is more of a typical and overt prog keyboardist approach, and while he is impressive and technical in his own right, the lack of Moore’s more experimental tendencies further limits the musical range of the album.
Perhaps with a bit more time with the band he could have found room for more unique expression but this never came to pass.
As is customary after a few decades, there are a few attempts underway to recast the album in a better light, as an underappreciated experiment. But I don’t buy it and the arguments for the supposedly good tracks are rather weak.
Hell’s Kitchen isn’t a bad instrumental, but it’s also not blowing my mind. Hollow Years is a good ballad, but I don’t listen to Dream Theater for the ballads and I think when a prog rock/metal album has to cling to featuring a pretty good non-prog song, that’s mostly damnation by faint praise.
Then there are people who like Trial of Tears, and I’m not joining their ranks either. There are a few interesting ideas and hooks in Trial of Tears, only not enough for 13 minutes, so the song takes far too long to get anywhere.
Essentially, when you tell a normal person that Dream Theater has 10+ minute long songs, and they give you that look of incomprehension it’s because they’re imagining a song like Trial of Tears. Nothing more than a rock track but extremely stretched out and occasionally ornamented with unnecessary flourishes.
I can’t describe this album in any other way than underwhelming.
Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory (1999)
As most Dream Theater fans know, there was originally not supposed to be a part 2 to Metropolis part 1. The title was only chosen to sound cool. But it was a beloved song and people kept asking for the second part, so they started writing it, initially for Falling into Infinity, but it wasn’t finished in time.
So a few years later it bloomed into an entire concept album, a metaphysical murder mystery about reincarnation, love and mental time travel and the music is just as wild and intense as its topics. The contrast to the previous album couldn’t be greater, and it’s widely viewed as a glorious return to form.
In addition the album serves as the introduction for Dream Theater’s new keyboard player Jordan Rudess. His musical style involves a lot of bold sounds, classically influenced melodies, and wild genre mashups. It’s a different approach than Kevin Moore, and there are people who strongly prefer Moore's style citing Rudess as being too gaudy and unsubtle. Personally, I think Rudess' over-the-top virtuosity naturally fits with the rest of the band and don't mind the more exaggerated sound (most of the time).
Metropolis seems tailor-made to show off Rudess’ talents, with the 20’s time travel and bouts of ethereal esotericism there are many chances for the keyboard to take on a variety different voices and styles.
There are also a lot of callbacks to the original Metropolis song of course, several musical themes that the album references, alters and expands adding another interesting layer to the music, a nice puzzle to analyze on repeat listens.
The story is fine, the plot, which I’m not going to spoil in detail for anyone who hasn’t listened to this yet, is not nearly as extravagant as the means used to convey it. The lyrics are as usual fairly unsubtle and in terms of symbolism often rather clunky. But the necessity to tell a consistent story prevent the writing from going off the deep end for the most part.
Metropolis is a great album to listen to but the plot is tied to the music so directly that individual songs don’t work well in isolation.[15] But I’m not certain if that is much of a criticism or just something that should be accepted as coming with the territory.
It definitely makes it pretty pointless to review most songs on their own when they’re meant to be part of a bigger package, the only outliers being The Dance of Eternity due to being an instrumental and Home on account of being rather strange.
The Dance of Eternity is particularly renowned as a standout instrumental, the proggiest piece possible, with more time signature changes than any other dream theater song[16], a bass solo by John Myung that’s just ridiculous, and a ragtime interlude by Rudess counteracting all the loopy complexity for a moment…. It’s a classic all right.
With Home, the album’s longest song, we get an intro featuring a sitar giving off strangely Arabic vibes and I have no idea if there’s any reason for that in the album’s story. But it quickly morphs into one of the heaviest and most memorable riffs on the whole disc. This is a song that plays a bunch of sex noises during its instrumental section and somehow manages to make it work without seeming overly silly. You have to hear it to believe it.
There’s lots of more to love about this album, I particularly enjoy how the anthemic and shamelessly kitschy The Spirit Carries On appears at first to be the oddly melodramatic conclusion of the story before Finally Free turns the whole thing on its head.
This is an excellent album.
Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (2002)
The first double album by Dream Theater of which the second disc is a concept album. Let's take a look at the non-concept disc first.
With The Glass Prison, we take our first step into the Twelve-Step Suite, an album-length composition released across five albums dealing with Mike Portnoy’s struggle with overcoming alcoholism.
The serious and personal theme of the songs making up this project doesn’t leave too much room for crazy playful experimentation; instead they are fierce and heavy, placing a lot of focus on percussion and groove, which makes sense considering it’s the drummer’s story.
And naturally with everything directly drawn from personal experience the lyrics are both authentic and vividly emotional. It’s a powerful work and with this first part we get a great intro for what to expect, including extra energetic and creative drumming (I’m fascinated by the rhythm during the first verse where the kick drums come on so fast that they almost register as a single beat), and the first instance of Portnoy singing backing vocals, something that would become more common during the next few albums even in non-Suite songs.
Misunderstood is a unique song, it starts slow without turning into a ballad, ramps up in very weird ways and even at full intensity avoids most of the usual “metal” sounds. It plays around with dissonance, most distinctively in a guitar solo played seemingly entirely off-key and an extended outro that sounds they’d have to replace all their instruments after performing it.
I’m sure this crosses the line into unlistenable for a lot of people, but I’m okay with them going there because it’s not like they made it their signature sound afterwards. Dream Theater is always progressive but Misunderstood is one of the few songs that go all the way to feeling avant-garde.
The Great Debate manages to be just as odd as Misunderstood but in a different, corny way and perhaps putting the two songs back-to-back was a means of acknowledging that. This is a song about the debate around stem cell research of all things, very long, very prog and using a lot of sampled voice clips from news interviews.
And if that sounds a bit gimmicky, wait until you experience advanced musical shenanigans such as putting left-wing arguments in the left audio channel and right-wing arguments in the right channel and singing the first verse in a heavily modulated robot voice because why not.
In any case, I have not heard of any recent heated debates about stem cell research (but I also don’t keep up with such news), so I can only assume that this song conclusively ended all of them.[17] I highly enjoy listening to this song when I’m in a goofy mood and the thought that it wasn’t meant to be goofy just makes it funnier.
Disappear slaps, but…
I mentioned earlier that there are fans who see Kevin Moore’s departure as the moment when Dream Theater lost their spark. The argument goes that Moore was the one band member providing any sort of thoughtful and emotional groundedness for the surrounding theatrics and that without him everything got too technical and “soulless”. The standard retort to such criticism is “Shut up, they wrote Disappear.”
It’s a good point. This song is devastating. It’s raw emotion. But while this is a win for post-Moore lyrics, that’s only one half. What about Moore the player? I have to admit I’m not convinced that “nothing” was lost.
Disappear is carried first and foremost by the haunting vocal performance and the gentle strumming of the acoustic guitar. But the keyboard? Not so much. Rudess’ semi-spooky theremin sounds are not unfitting, but they still can’t shake that awkward sense of corniness.
Comparing this to some of the darker songs on Awake I would claim that it wasn’t really a problem back then, at least not nearly as pronounced. There was a better sense of balance, building pathos without taking it over the top.
But going back to the question of emotional content, I don’t think this song fully vindicates the band’s approach to writing.
While Disappear can’t be described as overly mechanic or technical, it can be accused of being very melodramatic. And just like the absence of emotion, an excessively intense and melodramatic display of extreme emotion can come off as alienating, akin to putting on an act that is out of touch with genuine emotional subtleties of life. That said, in this particular case, the topic of Disappear absolutely earns its emotional force.
Blind Faith bored me and I don’t feel like writing about it.
A Strangely Thorough Critique of the Second Disc
Plot twist: I don’t really care about the actual “Six Degrees” song.
But at the same time it’s a considerable amount of music so it deserves proportional amount of critique and I truly wanted to get my head around what bugs me about this song, when I really should like it. After all adored Voices in Awake. So this should just be a longer, more in-depth version of that, right?
Unfortunately, this 42-minute behemoth song about six people suffering from mental “turbulence” stumbles a lot, in my opinion.
First off, even their repeated motifs, Six Degrees does not feel like feel like that one big 42-minute song it was marketed as. It’s very much eight songs of varying quality.
Is Overture a pretty cool instrumental piece on its own? Certainly. But it sounds more like the opening to some epic medieval fantasy themed video game than a story about people struggling with mental health, and each part picking up some cue from Overture isn’t enough to make it all feel coherent.
The rest of the songs are held back to their commitment to literalism.[18] The lyrics have so many characters to introduce, so much thematic ground to cover that they tend to act as pure exposition dumps and never get to do anything actually creative with their themes.
Remember my argument about specificity in lyrics creating its own novelty? Well, there’s a caveat to that.
When you take a direct approach to some very specific subject matter, there’s an expectation that the work will also make an equally direct and specific point.
I am not convinced Dream Theater had any point to make here besides “it sure sucks if you have to deal with that” which is just not enough for such a topic as complex as this, and the few aspects that the song attempts to tackle come off as rather unbalanced.
Take The Test That Stumped Them All as an example, the most intense and metal feeling section of the track. It paints a scathing picture of psychiatry, of living in filth and useless medications but it never qualifies if this portrayal is meant to be taken as accurate or merely as part of the symptoms of schizophrenia. Now as a starting point for discussing the theme of ethical problems in mental hospitals and mental health treatment in general this would be fine and effective, but the song refuses to engage with it any further.
The very notion of therapy, medication or really any sort of treatment is completely absent from any of the other stories told in the work, so with this oppressive and pessimistic view of psychiatric treatment being the only perspective offered, what is the song actually saying here? It’s cruel and useless, so don’t bother? I don’t think this is meant to be the message but it almost seems like it is.
Now perhaps you could claim that I’m nitpicking here, that obviously no metal song, no matter how long and extravagant, is prepared to deal with those questions. And I’d even be inclined to agree if Six Degrees wasn’t so completely mundane and self-serious.
Let’s again consider Voices: This is a song that handles its heavy subject matter with a sense of poetic distance while at the same time not diminishing how terrifying the situation it portrays is. But because it is a situation conveyed through evocative imagery, a nightmare painted in fairly broad strokes of metaphor, you don’t even think to ask “real world” questions about therapy and medication. But with Six Degrees going for “This is a serious and authentic portrayal of people struggling with those issues” it absolutely should invite those questions and it’s off-putting to have them sidelined to this extent.
But maybe that’s simply not what the song wanted to focus on because it has another narrative and message to convey that it cares about more.
So let’s try finding it. My approach to figuring the message of a song is rather is simple and obvious: Look for the part of the song that stops asking questions and is instead is making some appeal to the listener, a statement of fact that feels more imperative than descriptive.[19]
We find such parts, as we might expect, during the Grand Finale: “Hope in the face of our human distress helps us to understand the turbulence deep inside” and “Shame and disgrace over mental unrest keeps us from saving those we love”. The intended message of the piece neatly summed up. And it’s not even a bad point.
My problem is that this isn’t an observation that can be meaningfully established from the rest of the song.
With the exception of The Test That Stumped Them All which focuses its critique on institutions (a related but not exactly equivalent topic) where is that idea of shame and disgrace even represented at all?
Let’s highlight a few sections about family and loved ones from the earlier parts:
From About to Crash: “When she falls out of the sky he’ll be standing by” “She was raised […] by a charming and eccentric loving father. She was praised as the perfect teenage girl and everyone thought highly of her”
From Solitary Shell: “His mama always did her best and he was daddy’s pride and joy”
These are really the only portrayals of relationships in the song, and they seem very hopeful and non-judgmental, while other parts exclude the presence or opinion of other characters altogether. So the claim that we’re supposed to take this as a work admonishing the “shame and disgrace” people feel about mental illness just does not work.
And if the song wanted to convey that hope and empathy are the answer to these problems somehow, it doesn’t do a good job of that either. Both our examples of About to Crash and Solitary Shell portray loving and empathetic people, but it doesn’t seem to help the protagonists of those parts all that much, they are still very much struggling with their conditions, the people who are with them are instead depicted as helpless.
Where does that leave the message? If we wanted to construct the most charitable reading of the song, we could perhaps come up with an interpretation like their helplessness being a result of ignorance which is in turn a second-hand manifestation of shame, in the sense that friends and family member might refuse to admit that our protagonists are dealing with an actual mental illness because that would be a disgrace from their perspective.
But I don’t like that explanation, it seems too contrived, it puts too much on assumptions about the thoughts and motivations of people that the song doesn’t actually provide much characterization for. So why should our interpretation depend on it?
Plus if we assume that the problem is ineffective empathy tainted by ignorance (willful or not), where is the information needed to remedy that, the actual right approach even supposed to come from? Not from psychiatry, which is exclusively portrayed as dehumanizing and unhelpful. There’s no real answer here and once again I don’t think the song has as much enlightenment to offer as it claims.
But even if the message was insightful, the song is still structurally inconsistent. The duration of the songs seems oddly unbalanced, like the band ran out of things to say about one part and just moved on.
And finally there’s not even an even distribution of the sections themselves, for example when About to Crash gets a reprise and you think that maybe we will return to the other parts as well, perhaps for some overall conclusion to the stories during Grand Finale. But nope.
Losing Time is about another character again[20] and is awkwardly sandwiched into the same track as Grand Finale because they had to get in another “degree” somewhere.
So the whole structure is just very messy and it’s not progressive or inspired to be merely inconsistent.
So my general verdict is that I love disc 1. But disc 2 is a less than coherent piece that tries to do too much with a topic it has too little to say about. Overall this is “merely” a good album.
Train of Thought (2003)
With its heavy sound and accompanying heavy themes, I always saw this album as somewhat of a successor to Awake, which is maybe unfair because Awake is quite a bit better.
The biggest difference between the two (besides the Rudess on the keyboards) is that the anger expressed in Train of Thought seems mostly retroactive whereas in Awake everything is still in the process of parsing and resisting the problem.
This might sound a bit abstract, so let me elaborate: Here we get songs like As I Am and Honor Thy Father about people who were a problem at some point in the past but we are now looking at them from a perspective of someone who has removed themselves from their influence and can now voice their dissent from a safe distance. Similarly, This Dying Soul is all about engaging with the past, as the lyrics themselves put it “A living reflection seen from miles away” and In the Name of God features a fairly obvious problem judged with clearly drawn lines between good and bad.
This clarity of conviction is something that isn’t as present in Awake, where the lyrics deal with obviously screwed up situations but the people in those situations are still mostly entangled in them, it is not clear how to get out or even who exactly is to blame. The lyrics of The Mirror for example are written from the perspective of someone who has only now realized that they have (and potentially are) a problem and the solution or even just the possibility of redemption are still somewhat questionable as expressed in lyrics such as “How in the hell could you possibly forgive me?”
Others, 6:00, Voices, Lie and so on only have very faint whiffs of hope, if any.
This is why Train of Thought is not as dark in comparison, its anger and aggression are no longer an expression of despair but of catharsis; It’s all “Good riddance” and “I told you so”. And this works for the album’s equally aggressive sound but there was an intriguing aspect of vulnerability in the style of Awake, even if it was more depressing.
The only song that comes close to this in terms of lyrics is Endless Sacrifice because there is no clean solution for having to leave your family behind when you’re touring a lot, besides just gritting your teeth and making the best of it. Unfortunately, the song is otherwise quite weak. Apart from the shrill feedback-esque guitar squeal during the chorus, it doesn’t have much going on.
It might also be worth noting that we’re entering an era of albums featuring controversial mixing decisions with especially the bass getting a bit drowned out.
As I have already implied, most of the songs on the album are “Fuck Off” songs, in As I Am they tell people meddling with their sound to fuck off, in Honor Thy Father they tell Portnoy’s stepfather to fuck off, In the Name of God tells fundamentalist religious extremists to fuck off and in This Dying Soul (the second entry in the 12-Step Suite) Portnoy’s alcoholic past can also fuck off.
Only in Vacant no one fucks off. This song is about James LaBrie’s daughter being in a coma and it’s so gentle and tender that the contrast to the rest of the album is very jarring indeed.
Anything else is some of the most balls-to-the-wall metal Dream Theater has ever put out which is cool if maybe a little lacking in variety. As a result, the individual songs have some trouble standing out in terms of sound. As far as things go, I’d like to highlight… This Dying Soul has some really intense rap sections that work better than they have any right to, and Honor Thy Father makes the most of its aggressive energy and is probably one of my favorite tracks here, even if the middle section overdoes it with its use of voice samples that simply go on for a bit too long.
Stream of Consciousness is definitely a highlight and one of the best Dream Theater instrumentals to this day.[21] It may not start very fast and technical but it just keeps ramping up, keeps adding musical layers without losing steam at any point and the band really knows how to utilize the length of the song.
For example, by putting in two very different guitar solos that I am convinced only work as well as they do thanks to being featured in a monster of an instrumental track. The first solo is pure speed, pure shredding. It would be impressive in a regular song but might also come off as a bit overdone. But if you have 11 minutes in total, you can totally go for it because later there’s room for another solo that works as a contrast, going for maximum melodic focus instead.
This is another good album.
Octavarium (2005)
The album Octavarium ends with the song Octavarium and just like with A Change of Seasons most people probably buy Octavarium solely for Octavarium.
I don’t want to ignore the rest of the album, so let’s get into the other tracks first.
Besides the title track, the other highlight on the album has to be Panic Attack. It’s a straightforward song about having a panic attack and as someone who has suffered from the occasional panic attack in the past I can vouch for the accuracy of that portrayal. The song is restless and relentless, keeping up an unnerving energy and intensity throughout. There are parts where the kick-drums mimic an accelerated heartbeat, I love how LaBrie makes his voice tremble during the chorus as if in an actual state of panic, every part fits.
With Never Enough we get, for the second album in a row, a song depicting the shitty part of being in a band, this time it’s about fans complaining.
As the lyrics are written by Mike Portnoy, it’s not entirely clear if he’s talking about complaints regarding the band in general or against him directly, but either way it’s an all right song. Who expects a popular band to personally write them back anyway?
These Walls gains my approval for the bizarre intro where the guitar pretends to be a motorcycle for a while before transitioning into the riff. And despite lyrics feeling a bit too cheesy, it has enough compelling ideas in terms of sound to stay engaging, unlike I Walk Beside you, which has all the cheesiness of These Walls but almost none of the interesting music, making it a bit of a disappointment.
This is also the album that has Sacrificed Sons on it and that sure is a song. I can only say that releasing a 9/11 memorial song 4 years too late and somehow passing up the chance to make it 09:11 minutes long is a very Dream Theater move. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s a good song, it’s just pretty funny to me that it even exists.
I can only imagine that many Dream Theater fans had some friend or acquaintance who was still a bit on the fence about whether terrorism is bad or not until they were made to listen to this song: When LaBrie points out “Scriptures they heed have misled them,” at 03:15 they surely start to see the truth and by the time the guitar solo ramps up at 07:00 they are 100% convinced, guaranteed.[22]
The Answer Lies Within is a rare song that I can’t tell you anything about. I completely forgot its existence until I listened to it again in preparation for writing this post. Between then and now (this is taking a long time to write) I forgot everything about this song yet again. This is a special kind of unimpressive.
Track 8
Anyway... the highlight of the album is the song Octavarium. Twenty-four Minutes of greatness, with close to none of the annoyances I had with Six Degrees.
There are enough continuity and consistent motifs to read as a single composition. The themes manage to be both direct and abstract. The entangled ideas of influence, inevitability and circularity in life as well as the development of Dream Theater itself, strikes just the right balance between having a concrete theme and letting the audience come to their own conclusions and interpretations. For example, is the trippy and ever-shifting musical landscape of Full Circle exclusively a list of prog rock influences or also a representation of a mind descending into medication fueled delirium? Both readings work and I love that.
There is a fundamental ambiguity, very intentionally, about how we’re meant to engage with the song’s themes. It’s easy to make a song that’s about fate and reduce it either to “It’s all in God’s hands at that’s good” or “It’s all bullshit that should be fought against”.
The second part (Medicate), reads as a tragedy but the first part (Someone Like Him) is very much designed to make the audience question the direction of the entire song.
We start with someone's declaration of rebellion against someone, potentially a father figure, but as life goes on, they eventually reach a point at which they realize that all they really wanted was to be “someone just like him”.
It’s an interesting concept, and most importantly it brings up the difficulty of determining if we should be for or against a process when our standards, or our very outlook based on which we make that decision, may change as part of that very process.
It denies the very notion of a neutral outside perspective and if you ever want to get out of having to make a definitive judgment about a big idea, that’s a rather elegant way to go about it.
And does the song’s message actually portray fate and circularity as 100% inevitable?
It certainly leans towards that verdict but looking at one of the last lines of the song, “We move in circles balanced all the while on a gleaming razor’s edge”, the final “balanced on a razor’s edge”-part also strongly suggests that the situation is at the same time precarious, that a single nudge could take you off-course.
Would that be a bad thing? And would it be a choice? Again, I think this is a song where evoking abstract open-ended concepts without a super definite conclusion actually works out, because unlike in the case of purely personal experiences (as in A Change of Seasons), or very concrete psychological problems (as in Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence) we all inevitably to come up with our own worldview, our own answers to those big and often vague and unfalsifiable metaphysical problems.
Octavarium doesn’t provide those answers, it just gets the gears turning.
It seems strange that I don’t have nearly as much to write about Octavarium as I had about Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence when this is really the song that I wish Six Degrees was.
But in a way that is part of the nature of critique. It’s always the flaws of a work that stand out and invite discussion; What did go wrong exactly? How could it have been improved? What was it trying to say and what did it say instead? Flaws imply a potential for improvement, so analyzing them feels productive.
But when something is great, it speaks for itself. I feel like it doesn’t require my “help”. And it gets boring and repetitive to simply coast through a great work and point out “this is great, and that is great and this is amazing too…”, you don’t need me to tell you this, just go and experience it.
I would call this a great album, although few songs besides Octavarium itself and to be honest this album could simply be the titular track preceded by 52 minutes of fart noises and I’d still call it a great album.[23]
Systematic Chaos (2007)
Gene Simmons once claimed that in order to be considered real “Metal”, music has to deal width “the ground opening up and little dwarves coming out riding dragons”. By this definition, the closest Dream Theater ever came to releasing a proper metal album is Systematic Chaos.
Where Metropolis uses the supernatural as metaphor and framing device for its plot, Ministry of Lost Souls is a straight up ghost story, Dark Eternal Night a Lovecraftian horror yarn, Forsaken about some vampire or maybe alien and they are very literal about all of this.
To be honest I don’t listen to this album much and I don’t see it brought up that much either in general. The feeling I get is that the part of the album that has left the biggest impact is the striking cover art.[24]
So… does the inclusion of more fantasy-themed ideas help with the sketchy track record of the band’s lyrics? Not really. If anything it increases the tendency to weird excess.
As a prime example, I’m torn on how to rate The Dark Eternal Night, undoubtedly one of Dream Theater’s weirdest and corniest songs, lyrics half screamed, half rapped, full of random extreme horror tropes.
Honestly, it commits too hard to those cliches, to the point of becoming a bit cringe.[25] Some of the early parts made me ask myself, “Why did they think this song was a good idea?” and then that question was answered with “probably because of that amazing chorus” and “probably because of that sweet solo too”. If only we could have gotten the good parts without the annoying ones.
The aforementioned Ministry of Lost Souls is the first attempt at an emotional tearjerker of a song since Disappear and while the perspective of an explicitly supernatural afterlife does a decent job of setting it apart from that song, it also somewhat cheapens the melodrama.
Constant Motion is one of the two songs on the album without the fantasy theme.[26] As a wild and intense song about OCD, it’s not bad but perhaps a little too similar to Panic Attack, with the only innovation on display being the call-and-response lyrics with Portnoy. It’s neat, but not exceptional. Same for Forsaken, which remains enjoyable mostly because of one really cool riff or the lyrics if you’re a big fan of vampires I guess.
In the Presence of Enemies
The album also features its very own 20+ minutes epic song, called In the Presence of Enemies and it’s a weird one because it’s split across two tracks: the first opens the album, the second concludes it, so it doesn’t even look that long on first glance.
In a way, this makes sense. It looks different because they didn’t want In the Presence of Enemies to be compared to Octavarium because, quite frankly, it’s not nearly as good. But breaking it up doesn’t do the song any favors. For one, the lyrics are very directly told narrative which doesn’t work well with a 53-minute interruption before continuing the story somewhere in the middle. And it doesn’t actually change the fact that it’s still not as good as Octavarium.
It’s an interesting song, though, but not one I have much to say about. The story is apparently based on a manhwa called Priest, and maybe if I had read it I would have more to comment about it than I do. But I haven’t, so all I hear is a religiously tinged fall-and-redemption story that lacks the depth to have much of an emotional impact.
The band itself apparently loves this album and I do see why, making a record where you go hog wild with new and nerdy concepts sounds like it would be very fun to produce.
It just doesn’t seem to always result in the best product,[27] as to me, this is a good album but not much more.
Black Clouds & Silver Linings (2009)
Where do you go when your last album went all the way into the realm of fantasy? You go into the opposite direction. Almost all the material on this album could be described as “realist”. It’s all about things that actually happen to people, or more specifically that happened to people that are part of this band.
The result is unique, to say the least. As reflections on personal experiences, the feel of the lyrics couldn’t be more “authentic”, but frankly, how well this works for your enjoyment of the album can vary.
Since they are not explicitly tying the topics of the songs to a bigger point or more general statement, presenting the events simply as the things themselves, you could easily ask the question “but how much do I honestly care about what goes on in the life of Mike Portnoy or John Petrucci?” and if you don’t happen to care, some of the songs can be a bit much.
A Nightmare to Remember describes a car crash Petrucci experienced when he was young.
Wither is about Petrucci experiencing a writer’s block.
The Shattered Fortress wraps up Portnoy’s 12-Step Suite about overcoming alcoholism.
The Best of Times is Portnoy’s tribute to his father who died of cancer.
The Count of Tuscany is about a scary encounter Petrucci had on vacation.
It’s all very personal, sometimes to the point of awkwardness. I would particularly cite The Best of Times as the primary example here, it’s very heartfelt but it seems so private and peculiar to Portnoy personally that you almost feel like a voyeur listening to it.
The Shattered Fortress, the grand finale of the 12-Step Suite, avoids this issue because firstly, you’re already acclimated to the topic through the other 4 songs and secondly because alcoholism is, of course, a fairly common problem generally.
As for the song itself, it’s a powerhouse of a track, some of the heaviest stuff on the album, weaving in references to the other parts of the Suite throughout both lyrically and musically and it’s definitely closing out that project with a bang.
Unfortunately, Portnoy’s plans to play the entire 12-Step Suite live once it did not come to fruition, as he left the band after the release of this album. However in 2017 he achieved the next best thing, playing the full Suite in concert with Haken, another highly technical prog metal band heavily inspired by Dream Theater.
The Count of Tuscany
In the genre of songs about personal experiences, the artistic process, traumatic accidents and the loss of loved ones are not uncommon themes. But Dream Theater still finds a way to innovate: Although The Count of Tuscany theoretically fits with the theme of the album, it’s undeniably very weird, just a completely inexplicable song.
And I’m not complaining; this is without a doubt the best prog metal song about spooky Italian nobility I’ve heard in my entire life. If I have one criticism of this track, it’s that’s the synth section comes a bit out of nowhere.
But you can’t discuss this song without spoiling the ending of its narrative; Because in the end it’s the “story” of John Petrucci meeting a weird guy during a vacation and getting freaked out even though nothing sinister was ever going on.
There is something subversive and cheeky about having a grand 20 minute epic concerning a situation where nothing actually happens except a weird misunderstanding. And I get the same vibe from A Nightmare to Remember’s usage of growly vocals, where the roughest metal technique Dream Theater ever employed is utilized for conveying the most un-metal part of the song (“EVERYONE SURVIVED!”).
Call it a gimmick, but it’s an effective one. The Count of Tuscany is one of those songs that you play for a friend and you have fun watching them react to the weirdness of the story unfolding.
Wither is a fairly good slow Dream Theater songs, it’s just very overshadowed by the epics that make up most of the album.
Then there’s A Rite of Passage, a pretty meh track in general, rather repetitive, the riffs are nothing special and the lyrics are once again cheesy.
The only interesting observation about this song (and I’m sure that I’m not the first to point this out) is that, since all other songs deal with personal experiences of the band members, the inclusion of A Rite of Passage can only mean that someone in the band did join the Freemasons or the Illuminati at some point. Maybe John Myung?
Anyway, I think it’s a good album, almost closing in on great.
A Dramatic Turn of Events (2011)
After Mike Portnoy left, Dream Theater hosted an audition to choose their next drummer. What they needed was someone who could keep up with the band's complex and intense style, a player on the highest level. They quickly found their perfect match: Ringo Starr.
Wait, no. They found Mike Mangini. And basically the whole time between 2010 and 2023 the debate has raged on about who is better, Mike or Mike. I personally feel that the answer is obviously Mike. Mike just leaves Mike completely in the dust in every sense, like Mike wishes he was as good as Mike but he’s not.
Jokes aside, I really don’t have much of a preference. There are things to be noted about the differences in their drumming styles but this album is not a good indicator of them because Mangini wasn’t involved from the start. Instead, he was playing off finished demos with pre-programmed drum tracks, so while he can prove his technical chops the same can’t be said about the aspect of composition.
I didn’t know this when the album came out, but now that I do I can’t help but feel that this explains a lot of the problems I have with it (although perhaps it’s only confirmation bias). Because I do think that the drum parts are kinda bland and that many of the songs are simply structurally boring.
And the drum parts being written by a non-drummer (even one definitely knowledgeable about drums) could actually explain this, both from a perspective of rhythm and more general structure (Bridges in the Sky is really the only song where Mangini could go wild).
To put it another way, in A Dramatic Turn of Events the drums are just there to do their job. They support the other instruments, they keep the rhythm, they do a break here and there but they don’t fully have their own voice. In a band focused on virtuosity, you do want to have everyone's quirks shine through and there’s much less of that here.
So I’ll delay the actual discussion of Mangini’s technique until the next album, the one where he actually was involved in writing the music from the beginning.
However the drums are not the only part of the album that lacks variety, the rest of the sound feels same-y too. The songs sound good, but they all sound good in the same way. It seems every chorus is accompanied by the same generic combination of strings and choir.[28] When I think of Outcry, Lost Not Forgotten, Breaking All Illusions, or On the Backs of Angels, they all blend together. If you took a random sample of a few seconds of those songs, I couldn’t tell you which track it came from and that shouldn’t happen with an album that I listened to as much as this one.[29]
And was I the biggest fan of Portnoy’s backing vocals on previous albums? Not really. But it was another way to add variety that this album does not quite know how to compensate for.
The paradox here is that on their own, plenty of songs would be amazing editions to another album, but taken all together they’re underwhelming. Perhaps for a different kind of band this kind of album would be remarkable but from a prog metal band I expect a more eclectic selection.
That said, On the Backs of Angels is a pretty good song (good enough to get nominated for a Grammy) and I like the fairly direct political commentary (as well as the extremely silly artwork for the single showing a sheep targeted by crosshairs). Bridges in the Sky is a great song in general, the track where all musical choices of the album come together perfectly, it’s the real highlight.
I don’t even exactly dislike any song on the album except perhaps Beneath the Surface. And this isn’t only because my usual distaste for ballads but also because all I can think of when hearing those lyrics about someone giving up on love and closing off their feelings, is that we already have that song: It’s called Space-Dye Vest and it absolutely nailed those emotions.
This is just a watered-down version, one without the creative imagery, without the pointed commentary, without what that made that song feel unique and real. Maybe they wanted a song about the topic that they could play without the specter of Kevin Moore looming over them... but I still don’t particularly care.
Overall this album presents a more streamlined and approachable sound, and while it does a much better job of it than Falling Into Infinity (which sacrificed far too much heaviness), it only ends up proving that being streamlined and focused isn’t just not mandatory, it’s not even necessarily desirable.
This is an okay album.
Dream Theater (2013)
Dream Theater is Dream Theater trying to sound as much as Dream Theater as possible. Does it work? Sure, because they are Dream Theater.
Fortunately, being a generic dream theater album calls for more variety than what was offered on A Dramatic Turn of Events. And with Mike Mangini involved from the very start, the drum parts are far more varied and energetic.
Which is where we come again to the question of how much of a difference, if any, there is between Mangini’s and Portnoy’s drumming style. I think there is a difference but it’s not nearly significant enough to justify a preference for one over the other.
My take is that Mangini’s approach is more theoretical and technical. His playing is fully committed to and optimized for maximum speed and precision. This is not to say that Portnoy playing is sloppy or simple in comparison, I don’t think the total complexity really changed, only that it’s a less rigid approach in that for one the technicality is more of a means, for the other more of an end in itself.
But does technicality as an end inherently sacrifice expressiveness, or is it simply expressing something else? And am I actually hearing those differences or am I just convincing myself that I should be hearing them? Besides, much of the enjoyment of Dream Theater comes from appreciating virtuosity for the sake of virtuosity anyway, so either style works for me.
But there’s something that I’m more certain of and that is the fact that the mix of this album is a mixed bag.
I remember an interview with Petrucci at the time where he claimed that the aim of the mix was to make the guitar sound “like rich chocolate cake” and it does. It’s somewhat overindulgent and after a few pieces you’ve had enough for the day before you get too bloated.
But yeah, I can see what they’re going for, it’s a very warm and mid-heavy mix but it smudges the sound of the individual instruments too much for my liking, to the point of feeling overly dense and cloying.
The opening track The Enemy Inside pretty much sums up what you can expect from the album.
It’s a cross between Panic Attack and War Inside My Head, and while it’s better than the latter (on account of not being a two-minute snippet of a song), it never approaches the raw oppressive energy of the former. But besides the lack of originality, it’s a fun and technically impeccably executed song.(Impeccably enough to get the band nominated for a Grammy again.)
The Looking Glass is one of those songs where Dream Theater goes for a very different sound than they usually do. It’s not a very new or experimental sound (it’s fairly well known that it’s basically a Rush tribute), but it sounds great nonetheless, in fact, I would go as far as to say that the overbearing guitar centric mix of the album works for the arena-rock style of this track in particular.
It also helps that the theme of the lyrics are both relevant and to the point, even though it can come off as a bit condescending when someone who’s been pretty famous for close to 30 years makes a song about all those young losers vainly chasing fame. There might also be a sense of irony in being criticized for “living without shame” by a band who would go on to release The Astonishing. It’s still a really good song.
Behind the Veil, The Bigger Picture and Surrender to Reason are all pretty strong sounding songs that don’t leave much of an impact. The latter two also fall a bit too squarely into the Self-Help Metal niche, to excite me.
I had a whole analysis planned about the odd contradictions that bother me in verses such as “Would you talk me off the ledge or let me take the fall; Better to try and fail than to never try at all” but it just doesn’t feel worth it.[30]
With Enigma Machine we get our first instrumental in 10 years. It’s good but not mind-blowing. There are many “that was neat” moments but nothing that makes it come together as a great track. It’s hard to put into words but compared to the other instrumentals it takes you on less of a journey; It comes at you with a good riff and lots of energy but then it doesn’t seem to have anywhere noteworthy to go.
And yet, I keep trying to find some charitable angle from which this song might look better, I feel like I’m missing something, that I should like it more. For example, could the song be read as a reference? The part at 02:00 sure sounds a hell of a lot like the riffs in Change of Seasons, the section at 03:36 feels very Octavarium, and could the harsh and shrill sound employed around 03:05 be referencing the breakneck intensity of Stream of Consciousness? Or could it just be that these are not intentional references but simply the band repeating themselves due to a lack of innovation? I am still not sure.
Illumination theory is another miss as far as I’m concerned. It has the familiar problem of feeling like a few shorter songs glued together and just generally going through the motions; even the ethereal synth section sounds formulaic after The Count of Tuscany.
The lyrics aren’t saving this one either, it’s more self-help metal, and an especially vacuous example to boot. After going for maximum drama with lines like “What are you willing to kill for?” the song spins its wheels indecisively for a while before arriving at banal conclusions such as “surrender to the light” and “put your trust in love”.
These notions don’t merely lack novelty in general, they are also a rehashed in the context of this very album. In Along for the Ride, we find a similar sentiment in lines like “Through the gift of surrender I’m embracing the fight” [31] and “Out of the ashes I rise knowing that nothing is stronger than faith”.
My point being that Along for the Ride has about the same amount of thematic substance as Illumination Theory, but where the former gets to the point and doesn’t overstay its welcome with a brisk 4:45 runtime (while still including some interesting and groovy sections), Illumination Theory simply adds more padding, both with superfluous instrumentals and by having the lyrics consist of assorted examples of people who I guess live for things. Eh. They can do better than this.
This is a good album, but on the lower end of good.
The Astonishing (2016)
This album is totally wack.
If someone who just got into Dream Theater took a look at the bizarre lore, the uncanny valley character art and the very idea of the intentionally horrible NOMAC glitchfests, they could very easily think that this album is perhaps an overly elaborate April fools joke.
It wasn’t. I remember the big marketing push with the two “competing” email newsletters for the rebels and the empire, the concert being fully seated because they were very serious about the Opera part of “Rock Opera” and finally I remember seeing “The Astonishing Game” popping up on steam looking like crap and asking myself “Is this for real?”
Somehow they were completely serious about The Astonishing, a two-disc concept album set in the far future but also in a setting that has regressed into medieval feudalism, but that’s not what’s important; The important part is that the evil empire has banned music and the good rebels from Ravenskill village are going to save the day by bringing music back because they are the only place with a bard. I’m not making this up.
Explaining why the story of The Astonishing is so lame would neither be helpful nor interesting. It’s simply what you expect to happen when someone with no experience with writing this kind of a grand epic story puts himself in charge of writing a grand epic story with a whole alternate history setting and an entire ensemble cast.
The bigger and much more interesting question is: Why is it so lame in the musical sense as well? It’s not only that narrating a subpar fantasy novel gets in the way of the sweeping instrumental goodness that we’re used to. But yes, it’s obvious that this time the vocals do much more of the heavy lifting than on previous albums, and there sure are problems with that.
So I don’t usually see James LaBrie’s vocal range as an issue,[32] but The Astonishing decides to make it one anyway. The plan was probably to have distinct voices for different characters (I’m not sure they even tried that on Metropolis) but it all falls very flat. Nefaryus snarls, Faythe is high and breathy and everyone else just sounds like standard LaBrie.
And the more I think about it, the more I am convinced that this isn’t really LaBrie’s fault either. His range is fine, really,[33] there just isn’t much to those characters. Despite its obvious silliness The Astonishing tries to play itself up as some totally serious setting and the characters are meant to be real and grounded people that the audience should (somehow) take seriously as well.
What that actually means is that they are subdued and boring. You don’t have anyone who is super passionate, weird or flamboyant in a way that would require an interesting vocal performance, Nefaryus’ stock villainy shouldn’t be the extent of the album’s expressiveness.
But this is not the only subpar part of the album. It sounds like everyone else has seemingly dropped the ball as well. According to interviews Petrucci and Rudess were the primary mastermind behind the general concept but isn’t it super bizarre that on an album that Rudess was so heavily involved in conceptualizing he barely has anything interesting to do?
I think we’re coming closer to the actual conceptual problem here.
Because let’s just forget about all the specific worldbuilding. Sit back and imagine what Dream Theater concept album about an alternate history medieval-style science fiction/fantasy setting could sound like. I can hear it in my head right now, and it sounds rad as fuck.
Having a setting that’s a weird combination of historic periods, and generally unstuck from the real world could be a great chance to borrow from all sorts of different historical and cultural musical styles and techniques for a truly unique sound. Jordan Rudess’ keyboard could have been stuffed not only with the usual piano and classical orchestra sound,[34] but both with futuristic sounding instruments and weird old-timey stuff like the clavier, the harp, the hurdy-gurdy or whatever, with similar stylistic potential for the rest of the band.
But then you see the setting they decided on. The bad empire has outlawed music. The rebel’s “Savior” is the last dude with a guitar now and the whole rest of the world is populated with a culture that is fundamentally not musically representable because all they have is NOMACs.
There goes the variety. Dream Theater wanted to be clever, wanted to pay tribute to their craft, but by forcing the idea of music to be critical to the plot in this weird and contrived way, they have paradoxically created a story that leaves very little room for any kind of musical expression at all.
So what’s left? The default. Which is some generic prog riffing that is obviously competent but not exactly interesting. Because what would anything interesting be based on? All we have is some stock evil empire and stock good rebels that get their cliched themes and beyond that there’s not much substance here.
Maybe there could have been some version of The Astonishing that could have been great, but this isn’t it. Although it’s highly ambitious, this album is underwhelming at worst and okay at best.
Distance Over Time (2019)
This has been my favorite album for quite some time. That it’s better than The Astonishing is not a surprise but that it would also become my favorite album in general since Black Clouds and Silver Linings was honestly not what I had expected.
Specifically I think that this is the record where Dream Theater struck gold with the mix. It’s so crisp and clear, everything sounds very direct, the individual instruments can be made out very distinctly, which is an especially nice contrast to the approach heard in the self-titled album which sounds outright muffled by comparison. “Wow, you can actually hear John Myung!“ seems to be a general consensus, and this is certainly the Dream Theater album to recommend to any bass aficionados you know.[35]
The worst part about the album is its cover which looks like an uninspired stock photo.
It seems that in recent years the reception of this album has somewhat cooled off, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps there is a feeling that it is a lesser album because it didn’t go for a 20-minute epic. But not having been a fan of the more recent 20-minute epics, I don’t see this as a weakness.
In my opinion, there’s no truly bad song on this album. I love S2N in particular, the twangy bass intro is great, I like how the refrain gets longer every time, I like the weird little “wow” in the middle and, of course, I also like that the lyrics are tackling a contemporary and distinct topic, even if it’s really just complaining about all the upsetting stuff in the news these days. Considering the band members of Dream Theater are all getting on in age that seems totally on brand.
Barstool Warrior is a song that sounds fine, (mostly) does its job, but at the same time kind of bugs me, and I don’t know why it’s apparently so popular. Maybe you have to be an old grumpy dude to appreciate this one but to me it mostly sounded like an overwrought pity party, and even from that angle there’s something off about it.
Throughout the album there’s some fairly heavy processing on James’ LaBrie’s voice, with some plainly artificial reverb and added sharpness to it and I think for the high-octane style of the rest of the album this style of sound works, but when Barstool Warrior tries to go for an intimate emotional feel it clearly doesn’t. A more natural sound would have been more appropriate here.
That this is somehow the song people remember from this album is frustrating.[36]
Paralyzed and At Wit’s End are both darker songs about deeply screwed up relationships, and in a sense they feel eerily similar, which in turn begs the question of there being possibly some special reason for them being both included on the same album.
Maybe you could make an interpretation work where perhaps both songs describe the same relationship but from opposite perspectives. Such as “You’re getting worse, it’s killing you inside” from At Wit’s End being a response to the statement on Paralyzed “Breaking beneath the strain, I am paralyzed” and so on.
It would be an interesting scenario where essentially both sides view themselves as the primary victim in the situation they're in, but in the end I’m not sure that actually adds up in terms of evidence and I might just be overthinking this.[37]
Room 137 is another one of those songs that I wouldn’t call super well written but still rather refreshing in its weird specificity, and it sounds fittingly weird as well. One of those tracks that I don’t listen too often but I’m happy that it exists.
And finally: Nothing compares to Pale Blue Dot, a song that’s grandiose, inventive and unpredictable, everything I love about Dream Theater. I’d say you could put this track on Images and Words and it would fit right in. The lyrics are for once very good, some would say they are stellar for Dream Theater standards.
How was this achieved? Turns out the secret sauce was them not really writing the lyrics; Many of the most powerful and evocative passages and turns of phrase were lifted and modified from Carl Sagan’s famous commentary on the eponymous Pale Blue Dot photograph. I don’t see anything artistically wrong with that and if that helps the song, I’d even argue they should do it more often.
Anyway, this is a song I can listen to repeatedly without it getting boring and that’s not exactly common.
Viper King is a bonus track but I honestly couldn’t imagine the album without it. It’s silly fun and very intentionally this time. The sound is straightforward and the riff is catchy, the lyrics evoke Deep Purple’s Highway Star but without the satirical element, and that’s totally fine. The track has a great sense of energy throughout, and you can feel everyone had a blast just rocking out.
Unlike the last few albums, Dream Theater sounds fresh and reinvigorated with this one. I would rate it somewhere between great and excellent.
A View From the Top of the World (2021)
We’ve arrived at the last album with Mike Mangini at the drums. I quite like it, but with a few reservations.
The mix of the album continues to impress, retaining the clean clarity from Distance Over Time while opening up for a bit of a “bigger” sound as I would describe it. I might have a slight preference for the in-your-face intensity of the previous album, but they both sound fantastic.
This time I’ll put my main verdict of the album up front, because it applies to basically all the songs on it: Dream Theater are playing amazing, absolutely out of their minds, but I don’t know about those lyrics.
The Alien feels like a semi-sequel to Pale Blue Dot. But where that song gained its lyricism from the words of Carl Sagan, this one is 100% Dream Theater original and the comparison is not exactly flattering, with The Alien sounding much more clumsy in general. The “big twist” that it’s humans that are the aliens from the perspective from other worlds is also more of a witty shower thought than some mind-blowing epiphany, and it’s still the height of literary depth anything on the album achieves.
So while the song sounds great (great enough to actually win a Grammy as it turns out) and I like its general pacing, it feels lyrically anemic.
As already mentioned, this becomes a recurring theme. I just can’t really get into most of the album’s songs on a thematic level.
I cannot stress how much more “fresh” Distance over Time felt in comparison, like the band got inspired by lots of different things such as space, cars, 137, old drunk dudes and they immediately went ahead put it all into songs. Even if it was random, it also felt concrete.
This is what is missing here, the sense of them having found something new. Instead, everything mostly seems to be about vague big things generally happening.
Maybe we’re just back at the Images and Words approach of “big and grandiose words for big and grandiose music”, but 30 years have eroded the novelty.
Yet occasionally it still works, as with Awaken the Master, a song that can very much coast on how amazing it sounds, combining the heaviest of chugging with surprisingly gentle piano and orchestral instrumentation and pacing itself so perfectly that almost 10 minutes go by in a flash, and you don’t care if the lyrics make sense or who the master is even supposed to be.
Answering the Call comes close but feels mostly too similar, like it's another version of the same song, which is a natural weakness of music with very general inspirational themes.
Invisible Monster meanwhile sounds too bright and triumphant to fully work as a song about anything monstrous... unless maybe it’s meant to be played at the monster’s birthday party.
Sleeping Giant is the worst of the bunch, it completely lost me with its banal imagery of how much better it is to choose good over evil,[38] and that it’s meant to be themed after science fiction or Star Trek specifically is simply not apparent from the lyrics themselves. This one isn’t even saved by the rest of the music which is fairly unspectacular besides some interesting vocal melodies starting around four minutes in.
Luckily Transcending Time swings back to pretty good, as a neat keyboard heavy composition on the softer side of the band’s output and its contrast between mundane life and cosmic flights of fancy is the closest the album comes to anything actually creative lyrics-wise.
In summary besides the unfortunate Sleeping Giant all songs here are good but don’t quite reach great, except for Awaken the Master. Overall I can see the same sameness creeping in that bothered me about A Dramatic Turn of Events, but the sound of this album does have a broader range and is in my opinion more fun to listen to, so it mostly makes up for it.
The Titular Song
Like Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence back in the day, A View From the Top of the World takes a complex and interesting topic and mostly squanders it. It’s better than Illumination Theory but falls into the same trap of establishing its theme followed aimlessly tossing around adjacent ideas that don’t properly develop it.
It’s frustrating because it almost looks like it’s going somewhere. See, after the first verses and the chorus lay out how cool and awesome it is to be ambitious, the fourth verse rather suddenly hits us with the powerful line: “Lured into madness, addicted to the pain.”
And you think there is a thematic twist coming that the song would involve a dialogue where you first have the thesis of “Oh boy, ambition feels good and is the best thing ever” followed the antithesis of “This could just be a dangerous and fairly unhealthy addiction though” and the song will grapple with those positions in order to eventually combine both into a final synthesis that actually makes an insightful statement on the matter. But that never happens.
The second half of the song is mainly restating the point of the first couple of verses; Be ambitious even if it’s dangerous, the potential greatness is worth it and so on. All references to death and danger are immediately diminished in relation to the gratification of self-knowledge and pushing boundaries. What about the pain and madness mentioned earlier? Simply ignore those, I guess.
I’m not saying it’s wrong to end with a conclusion in favor of ambition, but the song unfortunately doesn’t seem to put much effort into earning it. And if they didn’t want to deal with any critical take on the matter, why even include the line about “madness“ at all, why sow that seed of doubt?
So much about the lyrics. Most of the instrumental sections are great, the second half drags from time to time but then redeems itself with that wonderfully bizarre section starting at 16:25. My problem is that Awaken the Master manages to contain more memorable parts within a shorter runtime which just doesn’t feel right.
In summary, it’s another album that’s hard to place but this time it’s somewhere between good and great.
Conclusion and Looking forward to Parasomnia
So you made it to the end. Here is your cookie![39]
I might or might not post a review of Parasomnia once it’s released, because I’m not sure if I’ll have enough to say about it for a whole post.
But there is one other Dream Theater-related project that I have planned, currently for sometime later this year: In 2019 an official novelization of The Astonishing was released and just last year the same author, Peter Orullian, also released the official novelization of Metropolis Pt. 2.
I feel more at home critiquing writing as opposed to music, so I think I’ll do a nice double review of both books after I’ve read them, see how the adaptation of a great concept album stacks up against the adaptation of a meh concept album. That’s going to be fun.
Going back to Parasomnia, the singles and track list announced so far have me pretty hopeful.
Night Terror is generally one of my favorite Dream Theater songs released in recent years.
It’s packed with several amazing riffs and it’s a great reintroduction for Portnoy, as the intro highlights a lot of uniquely Portnoyish flourishes ending with his signature drum fill.
There are lots of other cool things going on as well; the distinctly “analog” organ sound the keyboard employs throughout the song fits the gothic vibe and having a section filled with especially weird changes in time signatures accompanied by lyrics concerning uneasily transitioning between sleep states is exactly the sort of prog shenanigans that I expect from the band.
And luckily, the lyrics aren’t even as one-dimensional as the title suggests. Is it really just about nightmares? Is it about a family of spiders seeking shelter during a foggy and spooky Halloween night and the many scary things they encounter? I can’t tell and I’m fine with that. I have listened to this song a lot for the last few weeks and it’s not getting old yet.
A Broken Man was mainly fine, and I haven’t had enough time with Midnight Messiah to form much of an opinion on it.
And, of course, the album will feature another 20-minute heavyweight: The Shadow Man Incident. Will this be the first epic song that really hits the spot for me since The Count of Tuscany? There’s a decent chance honestly. With a title like that, the story is probably fairly specific and won’t devolve into weird affirmative self-help platitudes, and even if it fails at creating any serious drama it may still achieve the sort of lovable weirdness that The Count of Tuscany did.
I predict Parasomnia will be a very good Dream Theater album because it seems to have a lot of dream-related songs and looks very theatrical.
The End
^ And very importantly one EP as well. ^ I tend to find biographical details mostly boring. So I'm just going to focus on the music itself for the most part ^ I believe it’s close-minded and uninteresting to judge a reading of a work on authorial intent alone,[1] so when present an interpretation I generally don’t care much about it aligning with the intended meaning of a song. ^ As a side note, I don’t do usually do fandoms; I mostly enjoy things by myself and only occasionally float around the periphery of fan communities online; So I might comment on fandom takes that might not be the current fandom consensus anymore, I’m just not hip with any of the social stuff. ^ An early name of the band under which they never released a proper album. ^ The most experimental part is the sudden cut-off at the end, which apparently (and rather pretentiously) signifies death. ^ Personally I’d estimate my focus as 60/40 in favor of music. In hindsight, I do spend more time critiquing lyrics than the music itself, but that’s because the part I feel more comfortable with.[2] ^ Verse structure, meter and all that fancy stuff mean nothing to me, but I do know what a rhyme is. ^ This doesn’t mean realistic, because even unrealistic concepts can feel real and impactful on an emotional level, but that’s a whole other debate. ^ Referencing Part 2 here would be cheating. ^ If you're into prog metal you might also have heard of a little band called Tool with a similar problem. In their case the genre is more “Have you tried to transcend your mortal limitations today”-metal. Considering I haven't heard of that many fellow Tool fans who have made it to fifth-dimensional divine consciousness, I'm beginning to suspect that their advice isn't all that useful. ^ Except for the mixing and mastering, which he has vocally complained about in the past. ^ While I think that Octavarium is a better song, it can be a bit abstruse, and Change of Season’s rather straightforward structure just seems more beginner-friendly so to speak. ^ It’s commonly claimed that the studio demanded a more radio-friendly album after Awake although the band disputes any meddling haven taken place. ^ Also somewhat to sing in the shower and such, with the story being about a girl being murdered and such.[3] ^ Is that even still the case? I mean proportionally maybe but do really none of the 20+ minute songs the band has released since Metropolis have more time signatures than this 6-minute one? ^ As a side note I’m somewhat mystified by anyone describing the song as “non-partisan” to the issue. “Turn to the light; Don’t be frightened of the shadows it creates.” says the chorus, clearly choosing the side of the researchers while acknowledging that they’re taking a risk[4], “Turning away would be a terrible mistake” also advocates the more active side of the debate, the one pushing the boundaries. And when the next verse asserts that the embryonic material would be “thrown away or otherwise discarded”, the non-research arguments are again framed as negative and wasteful, without presenting any meaningful rebuttal. In fact, this argument basically defuses the most striking claim of the critic’s side, “Harvesting existence only to destroy “; After all, if the embryonic cells were discarded anyway[5], how would that be more humane? ^ And yet somehow some people still had to be told that for example Solitary Shell is about autism… what did they think it was about, lonely snails? ^ Yes, there are songs that are too ambiguous for this sort of simple analysis, but this is still Dream Theater we’re talking about here. ^ Surely, I can’t be the only one who at first believed that this part was again about the protagonist of About to Crash during a particularly bad episode, considering it directly follows the reprise ^ In most cases The Dance of Eternity takes the No. 1 spot. ^ I know that’s not the intent; it’s a show of solidarity, but this scenario was just too funny not to describe. ^ Yes, I’m aware that Octavarium also references the other songs on the album which would (presumably) not work as well if they were fart noises, that’s totally besides the point. ^ The ants specifically make their way into a lot of other art ^ They were lucky this word did not yet exist in its current usage in 2007. ^ The other one is Prophets of War, a song that skillfully makes the point that war is not good by not being good itself ^ There are, of course, instances where that approach worked out. ^ Yes, previous album also used this sound but there were always at least a few songs that went for something different. ^ I discovered Dream Theater around 2010, so this was the first album released while I was already a fan. For the first few weeks, it seemed like the best thing ever but in retrospect that didn’t last. ^ There are plenty of other weird lyrics here as well, like the chorus of “Restless Angels Help me Find My Way” where I just don’t get the reasoning behind the imagery. Why do the angels have to be “restless”? Are they coming untethered or something? ^ I believe the contradiction is deliberate irony, something I can’t detect anywhere in Illumination Theory. ^ All those posts I see online along the lines of “Isn’t it time for Dream Theater to take James LaBrie to the vet and have him euthanized or something?” are just very unnerving. ^ I partially get the criticism in terms of contrast; Every other member of the band is a complete virtuoso, often included among the top ten players for their instruments while LaBrie is not really among the top ten vocalists but he’s still really good. ^ Yes, I know at least some parts were recorded from a real orchestra… ^ I wonder how big of a demographic bass fans make up compared to fans of other instruments. I know people who would probably have trouble even picking out what sounds the bass actually makes in a song. ^ When A Broken Man was released as the second single of Parasomnia, I was quite afraid that the song would be Barstool Warrior 2.0 but luckily that wasn’t the case.[6] ^ Another tantalizing interpretation of At Wit’s End, solely based on the line “I know that it’s tearing you apart “ would be that the song is about Johnny in The Room. ^ But at the time the raging storm ought to be “embraced”, even though it’s below the armor that may or may not be made from hate, [7] where’s the consistency here? ^ I’m sorry that this is probably the worst attempt at a Photoshopped dream theater cookie you’ve ever seen, I thought I was better at this but I’m not.
^ Although it can be a helpful tool and I do read up on official statements occasionally. ^ And perhaps this could make it seem like I like their output less than I actually do, when in reality I can totally get over subpar lyrics when the rest of the music is good enough. ^ It was a hilarious moment when the words “Young Girl Murdered“ showed up on the screen at the 40th anniversary concert and the crowd went wild because the cool part of Overture 1928 was about to start. ^ Perhaps the anti-science reading could be that we should turn towards the light of God (“our unearthly guide”) but it doesn’t quite read right, since from the spiritual/anti-stem-cell point of view there would be no negatives or “shadows” created by this choice. ^ I don’t know the details of the actual arguments in the debate, which may be more nuanced, I’m just examining what the song chooses for its portrayal here. ^ Instead, it was War Inside My Head 3.0 (2.0 being, of course, The Enemy Inside). ^ And it’s also a bomb that somehow manages to tick while simultaneously not making any sound.
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