Label: Insideout Music
Release date: April 16, 2021
Production: Liquid Tension Experiment
Album length: 61.43 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 8.0/10
Liquid Tension Experiment is a musical project that put out two albums in 1998 and 1999. After that, the well ran dry: the quartet of three Dream Theater guys plus a King Crimson member simply couldn’t find the time, or the right spark, to record another one. They did keep the wagon rolling for a few more years, at least with live shows. When Portnoy left Dream Theater a good ten years ago, nobody suspected he’d suddenly end up tangled in several bands and projects at once. In just the last two years alone, he’s put his name on a bunch of freshly released albums (Transatlantic, Neal Morse, Flying Colors), but the main catalyst for us getting a brand new Liquid Tension Experiment album in mid-April, after a 22-year wait, was Petrucci’s solo studio album, where the two Dream Theater founders finally played together again after many years. All of it in a fully instrumental setting.
The quartet, who answered the recurring question of whether they’d ever make another Liquid Tension Experiment album with a diplomatic “no plans for now, but never say never,” actually recorded all the material for “LTE3” “in secret” last July at Headquarters, the studio where Dream Theater normally record. When the debut dropped in 1998, it floored people with its weirdness, challenging freshness and adventurousness. Back then, there were incomparably fewer musicians on the scene who could play the way Dream Theater do than there are today. The follow-up, “LTE2,” then mostly repeated what the debut had already said, so it didn’t surprise as much. “LTE3” faced a tough task: how do you actually show some new musical progress on new material? Well, it really doesn’t. What we got is a record that is, at moments, more Dream Theater-ish than you’d hope. It was to be expected that the instrumentals would drift into Dream Theater territory here and there, since three quarters of the lineup are, one way or another, inextricably tied to Dream Theater and are also the load-bearing pillars of the band’s sound and style. Still, you’d hope the quartet would spend considerably fewer minutes in the comfort zone and treat themselves to more hard-hitting escapes into experimental adventures, leaning on jazz-rock fusion elements and delivering at least a trace of some provocative loosening-up of the arrangements. Every Dream Theater fan will receive “LTE3” with enthusiasm, and it’ll also go down very well with everyone who would listen to Dream Theater without LaBrie on vocals but skips the band because of the singer’s vocal peculiarities, so “LTE3” may reach a considerably wider range of ‘prog lovers’ (even the more demanding ones) than a new Dream Theater album would.
The two most interesting tracks on the record are the cover of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” which the guys, with their breathtaking manual dexterity, have given a winding, spiritual makeover, and which shines with the lucidity of sparkling tricks, pranks and the perfectly working chemistry of the quartet. One of the transitions even sneaks in a bit of Levin’s “Elephant Talk” (around the seven-minute mark). The band never loses the red thread as the guys pass the main motif around, serving it to each other like a ball in a thousand and one ways. There’s no shortage of performance dynamite, top-notch fun or constant listening appeal, and the guys have been playing this Gershwin classic at concerts for more than ten years anyway. Always differently. Levin also swapped a few props here, from Chapman Stick to (classic) bass guitar. The spot on the album where more jazz and freewheeling experimental tricks finally shine through is Chris & Kevin’s Amazing Odyssey. The track’s title comes from an anecdote from over twenty years ago, when the band’s photographer, before shooting some promo photos, mistakenly called Portnoy and Levin “Chris” and “Kevin.” Here there’s finally a bit more room for Levin to build his sound, which he dominates especially in the closing section, where the track also picks up some distant characteristics that Levin brings to King Crimson’s music. In this one, Levin also picks up a violin bow, among other things.
Then there are two tracks where the guys calm down. They’re shorter. If Chris & Kevin’s Amazing Odyssey belongs to Portnoy and Levin, Shades of Hope belongs entirely to Rudess and Petrucci, who spin out an easygoing melody that would work nicely as background music in any movie with a happy ending. The other calmer moment on the album is its ambient detour, represented by Liquid Evolution. It’s an exceptionally beautiful instrumental that shows the whole Liquid Tension Experiment story isn’t just about charging cross-country, with a sea of notes spilling uncontrollably out of both your pockets. That very moment of speed “hyper-plasia” is announced by the band on the new album with the sonically bravura opening escapade called Hypersonic. This is the thing everyone in the project’s fanbase has been waiting over twenty years for. Interestingly, it’s actually the only one played in this mode. That is, when you put everything on maximum speed (note-shredding and drum hits per unit of time) while also pushing the performance to the limits of human capability. This track instantly re-establishes a direct connection with the first two albums (e.g. Paradigm Shift and/or Acid Rain). From there on, the quartet shows above all more arranging maturity and finesse, gained over years of creative, artistic growth on an individual level. The “sonic rage,” i.e. the album’s opener Hypersonic, is arranged entirely in a distinctly neo-classical style.
The superb closer Key To the Imagination is especially thrilling in its last two thirds, where the rhythm section builds a pronounced, dazzling groove while Rudess and Petrucci’s tricks drive the bulk of the track around its axis. The two also borrow a ton of inspiration from arabesques, or Oriental scales. With this track, the band sort of circles back to the album’s opening, the sonic lightning of Hypersonic, and the circle closes so neatly that you can easily hit “play” again.
Two more tracks remain. The Passage Of Time, which feels like a “lost” track from the Dream Theater album “Black Couds And Silver Linings,” just without LaBrie on vocals, and Beating the Odds, which, especially in Jordan Rudess’s parts, shows a distant inspiration from the iconic progressive rock trio Emerson Lake And Palmer.
“LTE3” will greatly satisfy all fans of John Petrucci and Dream Theater. As mentioned, it will be a joy for everyone who has a hard time with the vocal nature of Dream Theater albums and wants to simply enjoy the fully instrumental intactness. And there’s of course plenty of that on the new Liquid Tension Experiment album. Given the musicians’ enormous mileage, the endless ocean of albums they’ve released, and the fact that we know all four of them very well and know what they’re capable of, it’s a bit less exciting that the album lacks more exploratory daring, not to mention escapes toward the avant-garde, especially of the jazzy, salty kind. In other words, more unpredictable shock theater. They could easily have afforded that, but as it is, the album staggers into the comfort zone a few too many times, with echoes of the band members’ earlier, already well-known musical endeavors.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Hypersonic
2. Beating The Odds
3. Liquid Evolution
4. The Passage Of Time
5. Chris & Kevin’s Amazing Odyssey
6. Rhapsody In Blue
7. Shades Of Hope
8. Key To The Imagination
Lineup:
John Petrucci – guitar
Jordan Rudess – keyboards
Tony Levin – bass guitar, Chapman Stick
Mike Portnoy – drums
