(Inside Out Music)
Rating: 9.0
Back in Black. 5150. Heaven and Hell. Burn. Eat’em and Smile. A Momentary Lapse of Reason. Lick It Up. The Number of the Beast. Invariably, in moments of significant band lineup changes, there is a palpable elevation in fan interest, be it concern, excitement, or some anxious mix of the two. After a longer-than-usual hiatus, following 2021’s A View from the Top of the World, undisputed prog-metal royalty Dream Theater has electrified their longtime fans with the announcement of a new album with founding member Mike Portnoy.
Certainly not “just a drummer,” Portnoy has modeled his tenure in Dream Theater after boyhood hero Keith “the loon” Moon, known for being every bit as much a part of the musical forefront as Townshend and Entwistle. And so it is that this marks not just the return of a drummer who sets tempo to material written by guitarists, but rather, a drummer who functions as a principal of the artistic direction of the enterprise itself. While it was an interesting exercise seeing what the rest of the team would dream up on their own without the looming larger-than-life personality that is Mike Portnoy, there was a spectrum of interesting output ranging from ‘The Astonishing’ to ‘The Alien,’ there is a certain welcome familiarity with the reunion, like locating and restringing a favorite guitar from twenty years ago, and feeling the old resonance through a tube amp again. Muscle memory kicks in, and the next thing you know, it’s 2005 again.
The band seems to have had a moment in the studio that is equal parts “Ah ha” and “well duh” when a band called “Dream Theater” decides to produce an album, while perhaps not technically a concept album, does nonetheless follow a theme about parasomnia, which is to say, phenomena of night time and sleeping. Sleepwalking, night terrors, paralysis, reports of shadow men, that sort of thing. Much like waiting until 2013 to do a self-titled album, it is surprising that this theme did not emerge sooner for the band named for a slumbering theater of the mind. And so it is that we are now treated to Parasomnia, a seventy-two-minute reunion album fueled by a determination to prove that after forty years, this band still has the fuel for at least one more “good one” in the tank.
The first track welcomes us “In the Arms of Morpheus”. Before any music, there is the sound of bustling city streets, and our protagonist for the moment shuffles inside and closes the door to relax (open your eyes, Nicholas). Upon presumably drifting off to sleep, an odd and unnerving musical section begins to slowly arise from the quiet, playing tricks in both channels of audio before John Petrucci 8.0 arrives and blasts into the mix with some sludgy metal chords. While the band was recording Black Clouds And Silver Linings, Petrucci remarked that the longer his beard was getting, the heavier his writing was becoming. Well, Mister Nebula beard oil has finally achieved the next level and recorded something with eight strings. Congratulations Nigel, you turned it to eleven. There is nowhere to go from here.
Obviously, Petrucci is not alone, and Portnoy is beating his kit as it owes him money, John Myung is dutifully holding down the low end, and naturally, Jordan Rudess is doing his literal wizard things on the keyboard. The opener is instrumental, so functionally it’s almost an experiment of the liquid tension variety, but the songwriting is different. It feels more like a grand overture, even if the themes within aren’t necessarily reflective of the rest of the album. It might take a couple dozen more listens to tie together all the hidden nuance. Nonetheless, it’s a cool track in the vein of “Overture 1928” or to a lesser extent the Six Degrees overture. Short, but loaded with action from all instruments, particularly some very sweet sounds from Petrucci’s neck position DiMarzio sounding like butter through some 6L6 tubes.
The album transitions into a haunting, minor-key melody reminiscent of “Hell’s Kitchen” before slamming the listener into the heavyweight track that is the ten-minute cut “Night Terror.” As with the previous track, the mix is exceptional, the best we’ve heard from the band in years. Interestingly, the early sections of the track evoke shades of “As I Am” from Train of Thought. Whether it’s due to Mike’s return behind the drum kit or not, the “Golden Age of DT” energy feels unmistakable so far.
On that subject, this is also the point in the album where James LaBrie takes his place center stage behind the mic stand. While his natural timbre no longer quite matches up with his recordings pre-2010, and certainly nothing like the 1990s, perhaps it can be cautiously surmised that he is making an earnest effort to work with the tools he has today. As time takes its inevitable toll upon vocalists, there is an advantage in recording new material, in that one can lean into the current strengths, even if the new shortcomings are apparent when attempting older material. This new album seems to find LaBrie working within his new paradigm, and the delivery isn’t bad at all. Of course, having effectively unlimited takes to get the best performance doesn’t hurt either, and if it gives us the best record possible, who are we to complain?
The verse and chorus structure, naturally dealing with the subject of nightmares, is fairly standard for a heavy and reasonably accessible Dream Theater track. While James sings, John riffs away and Rudess flies up and down the scales using an acoustic piano tone. Once we get into the meaty instrumental middle bits, Petrucci and Rudess engage in instrumental counterplay in their classic fashion. Jordan does a good job of mixing up his sounds, ranging from ethereal string section chords to give a neoclassical vibe to some sections, to grand piano sounds, to his more usual lead synth tones, and even dabbling in those overdriven Hammond-Organ-Through-Marshall sounds that Jon Lord devised and Kevin Moore would later utilize on the Awake album. The band really holds nothing back on this track, even getting into a “Flight of the Bumblebee” sort of bit where the Johns and Jordan are going meedly-meedly as fast as they can while Portnoy rolls down the toms as quickly as he can, over and over, in a dizzying demonstration of how tight a band can be, even after years apart.
The third track, “A Broken Man”, opens with a dizzying maelstrom of instrumental fury. The tom rolls just before the military radio chatter and the gong make us once again wonder how the hell Mikey’s hands can go so fast. But getting back to the radio chatter, this seems to underscore the thematic elements of the track being about PTSD-induced terrors in the night. Once the verse structure is unveiled, the songwriting is fairly simple, just basic metal chugging, but as James leads into the chorus structure, Petrucci engages in some cool muted single-note sequences, and does some doubling of the parts in both channels, making an immersive feeling for the song, complete with the reverb and delay on James’s vocals.
It’s all pretty standard 21st-century Dream Theater writing for songs that are neither commercial nor epics. Even when the instrumental section kicks in, it’s kind of a cool low-key Blackmore/Lord sort of “Deep Purple” Hammond jam, which is good. What was not expected happens around the six-minute mark, when it launches into a mystical potato head groove type thing and eventually evolves into some kind of makeshift Dixie Dregs jam, hats off to Steve Morse and all. Points for surprise and creativity. It just sort of popped up from behind our Iggyloo, like the Zappa-ish section in Scenes from a Memory. Great googly-moogly.
“Dead Asleep” is a track lyrically describing sleepwalking, but not the garden variety where one might wake up in the kitchen staring into the fridge. This particular instance, based on true events, deals with dreaming about home invasion but waking up to discover the fatal tragedy of one’s own slain spouse, and the psyche-shattering guilt to follow. It opens with semi-clean chords being plucked out as individual notes, presumably on Petrucci’s Majesty guitar. The calm adagio quarter notes, reverberating in melancholy minor key eventually take a rest before launching off of a piano chord into a frantic nervous double-time, and suddenly become a detuned or seven-string chugging riff. It works through a few repetitions, with hints of pinch harmonic vibrato and some flanged effects, before Petrucci’s signature glassy lead tone cuts through the mix to deliver a tender moment before the riffs come back with some stabbing at the keys by Rudess until the first verses are delivered by James.
The next couple of minutes are fairly pedestrian (at least by the band’s standards), working through the verse-chorus structure. Finally, about six minutes into this ten-plus minute beast, the instruments get to dabble in a bit more creativity. The first minute or so of this section is Petrucci going for broke, in a mostly blues-based shred session on par with anything he did on his most recent tour with Portnoy and LaRue. He brings this home, just in time for the riffs to get a little meaner, and Jordan steps into one of his more usual “lead” keyboard tones, accelerating up and down the octaves across the keys, with some generous, yet strategically placed use of his expression ribbon vibrato tools of which he is such a master. Once this solo spot concludes, the band mashes out some instrumental parts with some cool arpeggios and other phrasings. James returns to the mic, partly supported by backing vocals as we get to hear the conclusion of the unfortunate sleepwalking husband, charges evidently dropped by the DA’s office upon review of his history of sleepwalking. Jordan concludes the track with a brief, bittersweet arrangement echoing in the silence.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the same thematic coin from being completely powerless in one’s dreams, we have the “Midnight Messiah”, a track dealing with some form of lucid dreaming, where one is all-powerful, to the point of losing touch with the waking world, a lyrical theme from Portnoy, his first since Black Clouds And Silver Linings. The song’s initial clean guitar parts, juxtaposed with confused voices, make way for palm-muted distortion scales, like something from the intergalactic adventures of “Ziltoid the Omniscient.” This then launches into the main riff structure, to introduce lyrics about our song’s protagonist living his best nightlife. The chorus is fairly unique to the album, feeling much more Adrenaline Mob than the normal Dream Theater songwriting. As a whole, the first five minutes of this eight-minute rocker are a straightforward headbanger, but shortly after that, Petrucci gets the zoomies and goes for broke, demonstrating age hasn’t slowed his hands in the least. The parts are impressive and thought-out, but when he goes into some kind of turbocharged Randy Rhoads’s “Flying High Again” tapping section with Jordan, it is indeed impressive.
“Are We Dreaming” is more of a preamble to the subsequent track. A brief little interlude of only about a minute and a half, it’s a church organ playing unnerving haunted house fare while we listen to the whispered voices of dreams. Or are they? In any case, “Bend the Clock” is a “what if” track in the vein of “Wasted Years” or “Time Stand Still”, wondering for a moment how life would turn out differently if those with sleep trauma could bend the clock and live life over again without such burdens. As a whole, it has the bittersweet balladic quality of something like “Hollow Years”. A minute and a half in, when Petrucci starts mashing some big chords, really pushing the tubes on his Boogie, it’s a bit like Scenes From A Memory when 30 seconds into “Overture 1928” when it’s time to change fingering back and forth on a couple really cool sounding chords. Or perhaps the very beginning of the reprise of “About to Crash”.
This fuzzy medium-high gain drives the ballad along for a couple of minutes through the verses and chorus, and a short guitar solo. Speaking of “About to Crash”, the writing and the tone of the track are a bit like the Six Degrees grand finale, and many of the Dream Theater “big finish” moments from previous work. With that said, after another visit with the chorus, Petrucci spends the last two and a half minutes on a ‘master beast’ of an outro solo, like some sort of Gilmour beauty from the Waters days, except that he waits until the solo is good and ripe before starting to inch the speed knob incrementally and tastefully. It’s a shame it’s a fade-out track because it’s some of the best playing we’ve heard from John in years. Taken as a whole, the track thematically does a good job of tying together the album and could have been a good ending, except that it would not be Dream Theater if the album did not end with an epic.
This leads us to “The Shadow Man Incident”, the twenty-minute juggernaut all the fans have been wondering about since the track list became public including the song’s durations. It opens with the winding up of a mechanical wooden music box playing an eerie melody before the band unveils the mean and nasty seven-string riff that sets the stage for this tale. What was especially unexpected was the “Metropolis” march returning for the first time since 1999, about two minutes in. Once some more guitar lead parts conclude, the lyrical sections commence, to introduce the song’s subject matter, namely, rumors of the shadow people which are a persistent favorite topic of paranormal debate.
The songwriting remains fairly straightforward for the first half of the song, once the framework is in place, and the heaviness continues to build as LaBrie delivers the verses, there’s a feeling of Systematic Chaos, some blend of “The Presence of Enemies” and “The Ministry of Lost Souls,” which is just as well since that is some choice Dream Theater material. H.P. Lovecraft pops in for a moment between the verses to tell us the good news about the Old Ones, and how that is not dead which can eternal lie, etc. It’s about halfway into the track that James LaBrie takes a few minutes of break so the rest of the band can dazzle the listener one last time.
The first thing one may notice is that the last ten minutes of the final track could be easily called “Hey did you know Mike Portnoy is back in Dream Theater?” He pulls all the stops, and we hear many of his favorite signature fills and patterns. We also get some very nice harmonized parts between the guitar and keys. There are also some heavy and very fast parts played staccato by the entire band before things get a bit Latin percussion with some flair that had us wondering if the ghost of Steve Stevens was in the room. When Petrucci takes a solo, he slaps around the tremolo to get some beautiful flutters a la “Under A Glass Moon.” The orchestration leading away from Petrucci’s solo is nice, and also an indication of how Jordan’s technology continues to evolve along with the band. We’ve come a long way since the early MIDI sort of sounds from Six Degrees.
LaBrie nails the last note of his performance pretty well, allowing John Petrucci to deliver one last beautiful medium-high gain solo with some very musical harmonics woven into the impressive right-hand picking sequences, and flawless left-hand vibrato. The orchestration and tom rolls take us to the ending (what, no gong?) and the city sound effects and water droplets from the first track awaken us, along with an alarm clock and a voice. No, no hypnotist, no Nicholas.
This album is a lot to digest, perhaps more than any album since The Astonishing. Other recent albums, like Distance Over Time and A View From The Top Of The World were certainly very good, but this album is dense, like a New York cheesecake. Let’s start with what’s good about it. Portnoy is back. Mangini was great, and he certainly let the other members stretch out in ways they might not have before 2010. However, one cannot ignore the profound impact Portnoy always had upon the creative direction of the band, and it is refreshing to have that back. Additionally, the mix is exceptional. It may be one of the best-sounding albums to the ears since Systematic Chaos or Octavarium.
The thematic elements are wonderful. Many of the albums in the Dream Theater discography have their own sort of unique feel, whether it’s the firmly progressive and groundbreaking nature of Images And Words, the more grounded metal grit of Awake, or the Lost-in-the-Nineties-Paradigm feeling of Falling Into Infinity. This album naturally is a collection of songs about unnerving things that interfere with sleep, or otherwise go “bump” in the night, and the instrumentation of the album largely reflects that vibe, in a similar way that the Six Degrees medley feels like mental anguish and turmoil from beginning to end. If a guess needed to be made about writing direction, the album seems to be primarily John Petrucci, but we’ll need to ask the band in a future interview. Speaking of John, as Petrucci and Rudess are the band’s two principal melodic instrumental musicians, all of their studio work since 1999 has usually been a balancing act of something like 50-50 workload, to some varying degree. This album seems to favor John over Jordan, at least in terms of the total volume of notes, and this may support speculation about songwriting for most of the album.
When it comes to drawbacks, it is difficult to imagine many about this record. If one is into three- and four-minute rock songs, this album was never for you, but then again, neither was this band. As much as the word has become cliché in musical discussion in recent years, much of the song structure of this album is derivative of previous work, but not in an entirely unwelcome way, especially when one considers much of the fanbase has been craving a return to the particular chemistry the band had prior to Portnoy’s sabbatical.
One might assume Queensrÿche fans would celebrate if the band wrote material that sounded just like Mindcrime derivative or not. And the same would go for Iron Maiden with just about any album from 1983 to 1988. Speaking of that golden age, Nicko’s retirement from touring does raise a question about James LaBrie and touring for the band. It almost sounds like Nicko plans to drum on future Maiden records, however, many may remain, but is no longer looking to tour. James proves on this album that when the songs are written to suit his voice as it exists today, the results are largely positive. However, recent tours have also proven that material from the past catalog is becoming increasingly challenging for him. This is not a critique of this album, necessarily, but it is an open topic for the future of Dream Theater, and it is being widely expressed across the fan base.
In the meantime, what we are left with is one of the most important albums in the band’s history. Following the bold and controversial Astonishing, the band played things relatively safe for the last two albums. Not bad, but fairly safe. Nothing to annoy fans, but nothing necessarily for the Dream Theater history books either.
This album, however, is objectively clear when it flashes a neon sign that effectively reads “back in business.” The guitars and keys are some of the best we have heard in years. John Myung does what he does like clockwork, dependably laying down bass lines that are technically proficient and underscore whatever is being played. Mike Portnoy’s excitement to be back (in the throne he never should have left) is almost tangible in his playing. And James made an obvious effort to give his best performance on this record and should be commended for that. The songwriting, while admittedly sometimes borrowing from the Dream Theater greatest hits collection, is enjoyable, well thought-out, and showcases the musicianship which keeps the fans coming back for more. This album can safely be considered essential listening for the longtime Dream Theater fan and progressive metal fans in the broader sense, and I hope you don’t miss it when it arrives on February 7th.
Release Date: February 7th, 2025
Musicians:
- James LaBrie / Lead vocals
- John Petrucci / Guitars, backing vocals
- Jordan Rudess / Keyboards, backing vocals
- John Myung / Bass, backing vocals
- Mike Portnoy / Drums & percussion, backing vocals
Pre-order Parasomnia here.
Source: bravewords.com
