Artist: Dream Theater
Label: Roadrunner Records
Release: year
Length: 75:22
Rating: 3/5
When you pop a new Dream Theater into the CD player in the new millennium, only two questions run through your head. The first goes like this: “Will I find anything listenable?” and the second goes like this: “After “Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence”, can anything even sound different anymore?”
Sadly, both questions are born of the skepticism that has become a given companion to new Dream Theater releases. Let’s get one thing straight first: Dram Theater remain, always and still today, a first-rate live attraction, and every penny spent on their DVDs and CDs documenting their live shows is a sin-worthy investment. But a band only really gets its due with studio work. On stage anything goes, in the studio, not so much. You have to distill the essence of yourself, show off your creative uniqueness. And that’s not always an easy job.
“Scenes From A Memory: Metropolis pt II” (1999) was and remains the band’s swan song. “Octavarium” (2005) showed some signs of a pleasant surprise. “Systematic Chaos” was another creative slump, and “Black Clouds And Silver Linings”? Roughly speaking, another lukewarm soup, miles away from the days of inspiration, and proof of the band’s creative exhaustion. These days all they care about is what they can possibly play, how fast, and in how many ways. From Iron Maiden and Metallica records to Pink Floyd and Genesis. It’s incorrigibly soulless showing off of schoolbook knowledge, fueled by steroid-pumped speed-solo repetition, all meant to hide one big problem.
Dream Theater, you see, were never famous for being a tight unit. Not in the sense of a stable lineup, mind you. They were always famous as individuals. From that angle it’s easy to get the impression that this is actually an artificially assembled band, which of course it isn’t. Five ego trips with little ear for one another. That’s why the songs are long and sprawling. Often too long, with too many motifs, and above all with way too much soloing. In the end all these songs come out sounding the same, even though they’re different. Maybe it’s because of these weak cohesive bonds between the members that Dream Theater can’t squeeze any greater compactness out of themselves, any melodic-motivic resolution or creative clarity.
A Nightmare to Remember, a good 15 minutes long, is a promising, highly atmospheric track in its first part, one that really fills you with hope given the usual sky-high expectations and demands a listener brings to a new Dream Theater release. The atmosphere the band creates with an outstanding wall of sound from riffs and keyboards, backed by the standard double bass drum pedal of Portnoy’s locomotive, is almost provocatively black metal. Then LaBrie joins in with vocals. The song is typical Dream Theater. Fragmented in its motifs, but up to 7 and a half minutes everything is boldly and pleasingly interwoven. A dynamic drift through many moods. All okay. Then comes the unlucky 36th second of the eighth minute, and Petrucci and Rudess, in their breakneck solo self-gratification, wreck everything the guys had built until then. Haven’t we heard this way more than enough times already? Downright obnoxious soloing that grinds through your brain like a coffee grinder, incompatible, unfelt. Two minutes of torment are followed at last by a melodic way out again, and after it a compact riff and even a brutal growl, which is more pleasing in the closing section than any of the solos. So the first track could have been two minutes shorter, and Dream Theater’s “hair-splitting” would have kept its point.
A Rite To Passage is something Dream Theater have been offering since “Train of Thought” (2003). A raw riff with an oriental twist and a successfully crafted melodic chorus. Of course the second half is again riddled with “solo-isms,” and the feeling at the end is the same as after the opening track. Whiter is the shortest track, ready to be released as a single, but we’ve heard all of this before with Forsaken, or Through Her Eyes, not to mention the superb Surrounded. The Shattered Fortress is an attempt to create a track similar to the classic Metropolis, with a cliché sugary intro and outro where you can sing the melody ahead of time. Once again the band is trying to recycle its former work. Way too obvious. The Best Of Times brings something a bit more interesting again. A twisting track, a flowing motif, and Petrucci manages to lay down an interesting intro with an oriental-Maiden-style design that fits neatly into the “Train of Thought” energy of the song. The heaviest track on the album, and in it Dream Theater are dangerous (thrash!) metalheads. If we ignore Rudess’s keyboard kitsch in the chorus, this is a track with potential. When Rudess bolts off into solos shortly before the seventh minute, you can only wish for one thing: “Rudess, leave Dream Theater right now!” Petrucci’s soloing in the last part of the track is perfectly sufficient, even listenable! Above all, the band skillfully pulls the track out in the closing section, as the dynamics build up there thanks to the progressively broken rhythms of Portnoy’s locomotive, which hauls the song out here.
The nearly 20-minute The Count Of Tuscany keeps buying off prog metal freaks with its length. The twelfth minute of the album is interesting, because it’s hard to miss the resemblance of Petrucci’s approach to the “steel pedal” trick Steve Howe used way back in 1974 on Yes’s album “Relayer,” in the song Gates Of Delirium before the part called Soon. Heh, we’re back at references again. The last track is a good track in itself, with no minuses. Even listenable. And more. Compactness even dominates fragmentation, despite the good 19 minutes the track clocks in at. I can conclude that this very track rescues the album from mediocrity, lifts it above the confusion that reigned on the album with the telling title “Systematic Chaos” (2007). And most importantly: Dream Theater didn’t wreck this track with solos. You could even say, to a certain extent, it’s a Change Of Seasons for 2009.
In terms of content, “Black Clouds And Silver Linings” is “Systematic Chaos” with a bit more compact resolve and the established “Train of Thought” metal rattling we’ve gotten used to by now. The new album isn’t special in any way. It’s not even attractive, and in that respect it’s more a step down for the band than a step up. It’s Dream Theater from head to toe, but with too much self-recycling, which the guys fail to disguise, since no real breeze of creative inspiration has blown through the band in ages. Above all, some of the forced solos still stand out painfully, especially the obnoxiously high-pitched, almost pinball or Super Nintendo sound of keyboardist Jordan Rudess, which gives us a fresh alibi to miss both Derek Sherinian and, even more, Kevin Moore. That also means the album could have been at least 20 minutes shorter and thereby gained a lot more appeal. So. A good album. No standout moments. Fans of the band will have it. The rest of us remain perfectly satisfied with the band’s output up to 1999.
Lineup
James LaBrie – vocals
John Petrucci – guitar
Jordan Rudess – keyboards
John Myung – bass
Mike Portnoy – drums
GUEST MUSICIAN:
Jerry Goodman – violin (track no. 5)
Production
Mike Portnoy & John Petrucci
Tracklist
1. A Nightmare to Remember (16:10)
2. A Rite of Passage (8:35)
3. Wither (5:25)
4. The Shattered Fortress (12:49)
5. The Best of Times (13:07)
6. The Count of Tuscany (19:16)
