Artist: Dream Theater
Label: Roadrunner Records
Release: 2007
Unbelievable! What is there even left to say about Dream Theater? Every two years, like clockwork, we get a new studio album from them. Good boys, I’m speechless. “Systematic Chaos” is the name of the new one. The title doesn’t exactly fit the rational stacking of properly built school-book scales that we’ve come to expect from the band, nor the ants on the cover, which symbolize a strict hierarchical social order. But with a hurricane’s downpour of those orderly sequences of textbook-approved note runs, Dream Theater are creating a true systematic chaos. Yes, and absolutely! A welcome title. Is chaos even allowed in the logical, Mr. Descartes?
Of course, the new album carries no concept, because Dream Theater just don’t find time for that sort of thing anymore. But the album is once again heavier, metal-sharpened and, compared to its predecessor “Octavarium”, far more fragmented, despite the 24-minute suite that “Octavarium” carries, since I Walk Beside You, for example, is a flash of brilliance that Dream Theater haven’t pulled off since Peruvian Skies. Petrucci said in an interview that the only thing the guys consciously kept in mind while preparing the new album was to strictly avoid any heart-wrenching, tender melodies. “Systematic Chaos” is, by its dose of a massive, chainsaw-like assault of the band’s familiar metal orgies, closer to “Train Of Thought” (2003) once again. But it keeps the complexity we know all too well from Dream Theater.
The new album proves that the band lost its bearings long ago. Dream Theater today come across as a unit that doesn’t know exactly what it even wants to express through its own prism of perceiving musical art. They act like a kid who has tried every toy in the world, and on that front they come off as awfully bloated and suffocating. Truth be told, since “Metropolis pt. 2.: Scenes From A Memory” (1999) we’ve been watching the songs get more and more fragmented, the motifs repeat, and the potential for fresh creative ideas suffer from a chronic shortage of freshness. Of course Dream Theater try to compensate for the fact that they no longer know what exactly they still want to show with a sea of notes, with complex meandering through the most impossible combinations of stacked rhythms, progressively broken, naturally. All of this is of course breathtaking and attractive, since it constantly boasts about pushing the limits of what’s possible whenever the human factor takes something on, in this case the fastest conceivable way of playing instruments. Dream Theater today are like a clumsy giant who breaks every single thing he touches. They play strictly at full tilt, raw, rational, and with the aim of reaching, at moments, “supersonic” speed. In this euphoric chaos, though, they’ve forgotten to express a clear essence, something simplicity and conciseness so often bring and build. They’re like a world “wrestling” champion who has pummeled every single opponent and is now trying, in the final of all finals, to pummel himself.
“Systematic Chaos” is a maximally packed album as far as running time goes. That only proves the band today doesn’t much care about highlighting quality moments, or about devoting their albums solely to the best stuff they compose. Or maybe they’re deeply mistaken in thinking that everything they put together is the best anyway? Furthermore, the album doesn’t hide the band’s recent obsession with covering the works of heavyweight classics like Metallica and Iron Maiden. The songs Forsaken and Prophets Of War don’t hide their parallels with classic Iron Maiden, or with the best of Bruce Dickinson, in the main riff. The Dark Eternal Night and Constant Motion are, in their basic motifs, direct copies of the Metallica legacy, both in the singing and the main riffs, with thrashing all over the place, the kind of thrashing that real thrash bands are the only ones to pull off satisfactorily. Where’s your own heavy metal, guys, the kind from the debut “When Dream And Day Unite” (1989)? A few more interesting moments on the new record come from Repentance, which has the most control in balancing guitars and keyboards and, in its calmer passages, an enviable level of high atmosphere.
The longer pieces The Ministry Of Lost Souls and the closing In The Presence Of Enemies pt. II, as expected, bring the wish of every thirsty Dream Theater fan: two songs that, given their length, are worthy of everyone’s admiration. Overall, the first of the two brings, alongside Repentance, another compositionally more exciting moment of the record, made up of two separate parts. A dreamy, highly atmospheric first seven-minute section, which the guys masterfully turn into a progressive metal assault, which they of course handle best, with the atmosphere and melody of the first part returning at the end. The track has a red thread running through it and doesn’t contain a shred of overdoing it! In The Presence Of Enemies pt. II also delivers what Dream Theater do all the time, very intensely! Combining technical complexity with elements of heavy metal into a kind of coexistence, despite the uninventiveness in the moments where metal riffs are used, all of which sound borrowed, so The Ministry Of Lost Souls and Redemption remain the album’s best moments as far as expressing “dream theater-ness” goes. It’s also interesting that Jordan Rudess isn’t as expressive on the new record as on “Octavarium”. Mostly he retreats to a rather narrowed palette of different sounds. That’s where the new album limps, since moments of experimentation are very rare. This only underlines the band’s stronger turn toward metal on the record.
“Systematic Chaos” doesn’t mean a single step forward for Dream Theater. It confirms that the band no longer knows how to compose expressive (distinctly their own) motifs, the kind that could stick in the ears up to and including 1999. Can the band really not write something like what “Falling Into Infinity” (1995) carried anymore? Simply, in the need to prove power, speed and unsurpassed precision, and in the wish to satisfy the fans’ basic needs, they overdo it from time to time. Yes. Even Dream Theater can get boring. As far as following the rules of school music textbooks and regulations goes, the album is good (is a bad Dream Theater album even possible in that case?), but artistically Dream Theaer are just regressively marching in place with it.
Line-up
James LaBrie – vocals
John Petrucci – guitar
Jordan Rudess – keyboards
John Myung – bass guitar
Mike Portnoy – drums
Production
John Petrucci & Mike Portnoy
Track list
1. In The Presence Of Enemies pt I.
2. Forsaken
3. Constant Motion
4. Dark Eternal Night
5. Repentance
6. Prophets Of War
7. Ministry Of Lost Souls
8. In The Presence Of Enemies pt II.
Album length: 78.45
