BLACK CLOUDS & SILVER LININGS

Dream Theater made their come back this year with a brand new release "Black Clouds And Silver Linings", an album that die hard DT fans waited for with high expectations, after the quite weak "Systematic Chaos" released in 2007. The waiting was partly worth it because this work is certainly more convincing than its predecessor anyway it clearly shows the band attempt to come back to a certain standard that according to the critics and to the audience reactions is lacking from too long. "Black clouds...." is a honest release with highs and lows, since it features a quite interesting epic like "The Count Of Tuscany" and "A Nightmare To Remember", but also pretty weak compositions like "A rite of Passage" and "The Best of Times" and the slightly better "Wither": all decent songs, that, anyway, leaves an undeniable sense of deja-vu, everything sounds pretty much like Dream Theater trying to write new material in the shadows of their past works. For instance the already cited "Wither" is very very similar to "The Answer Lies Within" from 2005 release "Octavarium"; "A rite of Passage" is similar to "These Walls", also this one on the "Octavarium" album. Finally the AA Portnoy's saga comes to an end with "The Shattered Fortress", nothing more than a collage of the previous songs, I mean "The glass prison", "This dying soul", "The root of all evil" and "Repentance". In the end it's a good album, which anyway keeps on losing that particular magic that made so great works like "Scenes from A memory" or even "Six degrees of inner turbulence". The album surely suffers from DT quite unreasonable will to get more "Gothic" as Jordan Rudess said in a recent interview, a path that we really hope they will leave as soon as possible!

Talking about the second disc in which DT homage some of the bands that inspired them all trough the years, I have been a bit disappointed since the recording quality is quite rough and the playing level on classic like King Crimson's "Lark's Tongues In Aspic part II" is quite low.The whole cd sound a little bit chaotic, and in my opinion, not so well conceived.

A decent album, with a couple of interesting tracks, anyway we're still far from the real Dream Theater standard.

My rating is 3 stars