A lot can happen in fifteen years for the average person, but for Dream Theater, who float in their own dimensional bubble distant to the rest of us, the time can pass in the blink of an eye. Drummer Mike Portnoy is back after a three album absence for ‘Parasomnia’, a record that encapsulates every era of the band’s four decade long career simultaneously. It’s both exactly what you’d expect a new Dream Theater album to sound like, and nothing like it at all.
On one hand, you’re looking for maximalism, you’ve come to the right place. This is, of course, a trademark of the Dream Theater’s sound, and once that we can rejoice in their desire to keep. Each song runs as its own ten-minute-long window into a private universe, much as advance single ‘Night Terror’ suggested when it dropped late last year. The iconic riff emerging from the mists that shroud the first thirty seconds of the epic would probably be enough to convert you to the Dream Theater fandom, if you weren’t already in it. This tendency towards indulgence means we get songs within songs, little alleyways and avenues of discoveries within each luxuriantly stretched track.
While perhaps the voice samples on tracks like ‘Midnight Messiah’ seem a little out of place, this isn’t an album where you ponder the poetry of the lyrics. It’s an hour of alternating between head banging and considering the depth of the mental formulae that created each episode. It’s all about the dreamscapes, and while nightmarish horror is never really evoked, the twisting and unseeable paths that we walk between sleeping and waking seep from every turn that each melody takes. If you’re looking for shredding in the most classic of fashions, along with drumbeats that should probably come with a health warning, then ‘A Broken Man’ will satisfy you in the most fundamental way. They’ve avoided going full ballad on this record, instead adding their drama to smaller phrases to create profoundly impressive walls of intelligent noise.
Yet, within all their hallmarked prog odysseys, it’s clear that Dream Theater are aiming to capture something new and different, to spread their well-oiled metal wings. The Grammy winners made their name through being different and establishing their sub-genre, so to open with a jarring five minutes of whispers and alarm clocks that drift into sci-fi synth as narrative building is a step beyond what we’ve experienced so far. After forty years of doing their thing, they’re more than entitled to get a little experimental and to build in overtures to their pocket operas, but to structure everything on this grand a scale feels like a victory. The luxurious opening to ‘Dead Asleep’ bears nothing in common with the album’s theme, but it emerges into a track that you could lose yourself in, a confident blend of experience and a desire to explore new interests as they gently push at the boundaries of what we class as their sound. Of course, there’s so much theatricality that you could turn each song into it’s own short film, and undoubtedly some fans will try to. But there’s also a serious dedication to improving and maintaining their position as stadium-hoppers; a taut, earnest quality that makes this album a subtle new step on the Dream Theater journey.
The haters will say this is boring twaddle from a band with four decades of adding in extra bridges and notes at every opportunity. Perhaps, at first listen, you could see why: the songs are very long, with the levels of extraneous notes that we’d expect from freeform jazz. But on a second listen, or even a cursory glance under the metaphorical hood, it’s clear that this is a bold album that balances a well-refined sound and fan expectations with a desire to create something lasting. ‘Parasomnia’ contains little excerpts from all across the Dream Theater story, serving as a primer for new fans and a reminder for their faithful how they made it to the top. Listen to it now, let yourself be absorbed by it, and don’t be surprised when it’s on every ‘Album of the Something’ list for a long time to come.
KATE ALLVEY