First up, I don’t often write about music on this blog. I honestly find it difficult to write about music in any way that feels authoritative. I can tell you what I like, why it makes no damned sense, and discuss why my standards are stratospheric compared to…well, let’s just call ’em normal people. I loathe the music of Taylor Swift. I think that Andy Tillison is a genius. Steve Vai is among my favorite guitarists partially because of how his excess shines through. I think Blixa Bargeld is similarly gifted while approaching the instrument from the opposite end of the creative spectrum from Vai. I like noise and drone. I like electronic music. I have the early Garth Brooks albums on vinyl – nostalgia is a hell of a drug. I collect video game soundtracks to the point that I’m annoyed about how hard it is to find a reasonably priced authentic copy of the Final Fantasy IV: Celtic Moon album .
My taste in music is nonsense. And then I’m an ardent prog rock fan.
I get excited for hour long songs, impenetrable lyrics that poke at psuedo-philosophical concepts and wade through the cliffs notes of thousand page novels in twenty minutes – Yes were so good in the 70s. I seek out bands when the word “pretentious” is plastered upon them. I’ve been this way for over twenty years, starting with my obsession with Rush and Pink Floyd. When I got into Dream Theater because of a scrap of guitar tab given to me by a friend at school, I was too far gone to be saved.
I became a music snob. Still am. It exhibits itself in weird ways all the time, but I am a colossal music snob, impossible to please, whose needs from the art are ever shifting.
This is all to establish a foundation for what I am about to write. There is no chance that I’ll be able to give you a clear rationale behind what I’m about to say, but after listening to the third lead track from the upcoming Dream Theater album, Parasomnia, I wanted to put the thoughts to page.
Black Clouds and Silver Linings
With hindsight, the title of Dream Theater’s tenth studio album reads prophetic to my experience with the band. I was in college in 2009, and had spent a couple of years working in a record store. My listening had broadened some, but not as much as it would over the next decade. Dream Theater had been replaced by Steven Wilson and Porcupine Tree in my personal top five, and each new album since I’d become a fan was increasingly disappointing. I started listening to the band in 2003, right before they released Train of Thought. I never clicked with most of that album, but then Octavarium was on the way! Maybe it would be better. Twenty years later, the only thing I really like on the album is the title track, and even that is limited to the music. Systematic Chaos came across weak, a feeling I felt more after watching the included documentary with the special edition of the album.
But it was Black Clouds & Silver Linings that tossed me to the curb. I didn’t have a job for most of 2009, so for the first time since Octavarium, I wasn’t going out and buying a copy around release. My best friend bought it. We listened to it that afternoon while we sat around our apartment.
I hated it. I thought it was one of the most tepid, meandering, meaningless records I’d ever heard. It came out the same year as Porcupine Tree’s The Incident, which was far more energetic, electrifying, and bold than the new Dream Theater.
This isn’t to say that the band wasn’t performing at their peak – that is never the case. Every member of Dream Theater is a masterclass musician. And James Labrie is a fine vocalist – an opinion I still hold counter to so many Dream Theater fans that will never understand that he’s not leaving the band until that band ends.
Black Clouds had all of the hallmarks of what I thought made Systematic Chaos a middling DT album – Mike Portnoy sings too much, the focus on “being heavy” meant boring rhythm parts, some of the lyrics were ridiculous to the point of absurdity. And let me be clear, I like some of their most abstract fantasy bullshit lyrics more than their actual best songs. Give me a Surrounded just as much as you give me a Space Dye Vest any day. But Forsaken is literally about a vampire.
Last year, I picked up a copy of the three disc version of BC&SL, mostly to listen to the bonus disc where they recorded a bunch of solid covers of Queen and King Crimson. Time didn’t give me a fresh appreciation for the album. I have listened to it several times, and I still just…don’t like it. None of it sticks with me. It sounds like Dream Theater on auto-pilot.
So Dream Theater slipped further away from my interests. And Mike Portnoy left the band.
The Mangini Era
I skipped A Dramatic Turn of Events despite watching the documentary about searching for a new drummer. I still wonder what kind of band they would have been if Virgil Donati had been in the lineup given how much he put his own spin on the songs they auditioned him with. As the fans know now, though, Mike Mangini joined the band and went on to record five studio albums with the band before Portnoy rejoined in 2023. I remember listening to the lead track from Mangini’s first turn with the band, On the Backs of Angels, and thinking it was alright, but I never sought the album out. As time goes on, I still think about picking it up if I see it in a record shop.
However, it was their self titled 2013 album that got me to give them another go. For the first time in a decade, Dream Theater sounded like a band with motivation and drive. They still sounded the same, signature Dream Theater unmoving since 1999. It was a killer record though, and one that got my attention back onto the band. It came at a weird time though, because at the time I’d been deeply into the work of Sunn. Monoliths and Dimensions kept my ears shaking during every writing session from 2012 to 2014.
I picked up the next two DT albums when they dropped, The Astonishing and Distance Over Time. I am the seemingly rare Astonishing fan. It’s an overcooked concept album derived from so many contemporary trends in fantasy that relies entirely on the strength of James Labrie’s ability to deliver the voice of the numerous characters in the album. It’s honestly a cheesy mess. It’s everything I wanted from it. I honestly think it’s one of the most compelling things they’ve done since the nineties simply because it steps far enough away from the core of their sound to be captivating. It’s too long. It’s ridiculously plot heavy. But it’s a big prog metal passion project, and there’s a lot of love in that record. John Petrucci wrote some of the best music he’s ever written on that album, and I don’t give a damn that everyone disagrees with me. I’m used to it. I also think that The Rainbow Children is an unsung masterpiece in Prince’s catalog.
As Dream Theater continued on, Mike Portnoy was floating between numerous super groups after his break from Avenged Sevenfold. The Winery Dogs, Adrenaline Mob, Sons of Apollo…and two more that I never heard about until I went to Wikipedia to fill out this section…
It deserves mentioning that Mike Portnoy has always been a force in the prog rock scene. The list of projects he’s been involved with is staggering, comparable to…what…Jan Axel von Blomberg? He may even have Hellhammer outdone. I have no disrespect for Portnoy as a musician. I recently sat at my desk and listened to the first OSI album three times in a row simply because it’s a stellar progressive metal album, rife with incredible musicianship and stellar songwriting. He’s great on that album, much like he was great on so many of the albums around that time.
But none of his post-A7X bands were interesting. I never heard anything from those albums that clicked. It all felt safe. It didn’t matter how many world class musicians joined Mike Portnoy for a new band, I never got through an entire record from those bands. I tried. I did. I would give each of those bands a song or two and just fall back off.
It seems simple from a distance – I just don’t enjoy Mike Portnoy as a creative entity anymore.
Again, this isn’t disrespect. He seems like a great guy, and he’s a stellar percussionist. But he’s not been one of my favorites for a long time, long since replaced by Gavin Harrison. Whatever shifted in his priorities as a songwriter and contributor as a band happened in the mid-aughts, and he’s been on that path ever since. I didn’t enjoy his push to sing more and more on each subsequent Dream Theater album at the time.
And that’s why I was anxious about his rejoining Dream Theater in 2023. I hadn’t listened to the last album they recorded with Mangini yet – I think this was around the time that I was listening to cast albums from Broadway musicals and dark wave pop. Songs from their new album were popping up in late 2024. It was time to see what Dream Theater would be next.
When Portnoy and Petrucci Reunite
I am finally listening to A View From the Top of the World as I write this meandering mess of a blog – as if I write anything else in my blog. It’s great. It’s a culmination of so much of what made the Mangini era of Dream Theater so right for me, minus The Astonishing since they probably don’t want to risk upsetting their fans by doing anything like it again. Mangini drops blast beats in the 20 minute title track. The ebbs and flows in that title track are so stunning that I can’t wait to listen to this record again over the next few weeks. The lead track The Alien, is packed with interesting rhythm parts. I definitely need more spins to get this one fully into my head, but I’m honestly going to miss this era of Dream Theater. I have to assume that it’s because I prefer John Petrucci’s songwriting in the band to Portnoy’s, and they are, historically speaking only, the Paul McCartney and John Lennon of the band. Respectfully. Because neither of them are as good as John Myung, who is George Harrison in this analogy.
Petrucci’s solos in the absence of Portnoy have more lyricism and melody than the shred-heavy guitar exercises of BC&SL or Systematic Chaos. He’s a more interesting musician without Portnoy, to my ear.
I have to say this because I did listen to Night Terror the day it went online. And I hated it. I hated it the same way I hated that first listen of Black Clouds & Silver Linings. It was tedious, grunting metal guitar, devoid of everything that I felt came back during the Mangini era. Viper King ripped so damned hard, and now we’re just getting stock metal riffs filtered through Petrucci’s speed, complete with scale practices in lieu of a proper guitar solo.
Two more songs have come out since that one. It doesn’t sound like we’re going to get anything like Barstool Warrior or The Looking Glass this time. It’s the same kind of metal that they pursued on Train of Thought, and it’s just dull. Midnight Messiah drops lyrical references to two older Dream Theater songs, and cannibalizing your own legacy isn’t promising.
I have tickets to see them on their 40th anniversary tour. I’m obviously excited to see them live again, this being the first time I’ve seen them since the Images and Words and Beyond tour. I’ll get to see Portnoy perform with them this time. Maybe the new songs play better live? Because I’m now listening to Night Terror again, just thinking about how much it feels like they’re repackaging their previous heavy songs.
The disappointing fact at the heart of this is that this is the band that wrote Awake, which for me is a holy text for progressive metal in the same way that Images and Words is. While I&W features the melodious side of Dream Theater over the heavy side, Awake went heavy, and maintained all of the characteristics of what makes Dream Theater such a great band. Voices, Lie, The Mirror, Scarred are all still among my favorite songs from the band.
Maybe they’ll pull out another great record after Parasomnia. Obviously, I’m still watching to see what they do.
WordsThing 