Showing my age here, but I first heard Dream Theater in 1994, when they released the all time classic Awake album. I was instantaneously hooked, and they quickly became one of my absolute favourite bands on the planet, over a series of superb, ground-breaking progressive metal albums over the next ten years.
Something has happened to this band on their last three or four albums, however. It’s no mystery, it happens to a lot of bands, to the point where it’s almost inevitable. The blinding technical skill is still there in droves, don’t worry about that. They can still write a good, strong, epic prog-metal song, that’s still a given. The issue is a little more indefinable. Like many long running, highly successful bands, somewhere along the line (in these guys’ case, in the last decade or so since the blistering Train of Thought album) Dream Theater got rich, happy and lost their edge, their hunger.
This self-titled release, like their last three or four albums, finds them sounding like a bunch of, albeit prodigiously talented, middle-aged blokes playing prog-metal, as opposed to the lean, hungry unit they were previously, a band that played prog-metal like their lives depended on it.
It’s absolutely not a poor album by any stretch of the imagination. Guys this good are incapable of producing a dud. The playing is superb, the production is strong, the songs are compelling. There’s just a special something missing. I keep going back to that word, hunger.
I still consider Dream Theater to be one of my favourite bands, and I will still go and see them live when they tour again, no question. It can’t really be helped, as people get older, they start to slow down. These guys are all around 50 years of age, and from that perspective they are doing extremely well. It just seems that there isn’t another album as good as Awake or Train of Thought in them. And, ultimately, that’s probably ok.
BY ROD WHITFIELD
Best Track: The Looking Glass.
If You Like These, You’ll Dig This: Rush, Porcupine Tree, Symphony X.
In A Word: Middle-aged.
