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Dream Theater - Parasomnia CD (album) cover

PARASOMNIA

Dream Theater

 

Progressive Metal

4.01 | 315 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

thecouga like
2 stars Dream Theater is and has been my favorite band for nearly 30 years now, but my love for them is based mostly on their past albums. Their creativity peaked about 20 years ago, and has been in decline since. The departure of Mike Portnoy over a decade ago sparked a bit of a short-lived renaissance (the first 3 Mangini albums had some songs going in interesting directions, and the Astonishing was a daring and delightful foray into something grand), but now we're back to a time where Dream Theater is putting out entire albums of nothing more than a traffic jam of down-tuned, semitonic/diminished jams with little to no memorable licks, riffs, or melodies--kind of where they left off with Black Clouds. They've foregone the mood creation that used to put the "Dream" in Dream Theater for an entire album of strung-together musical passages that one could mistake for a warm-up exercise rather than a song. There's only one listenable song on this album, Bend the Clock, which is a reminder to all that these guys still have amazing songwriting abilities, should they decide to put themselves up to such a task. But like their worst critics have said over the years (despite not being entirely true in their earlier days), much of their modern music is nothing more than a disjointed showcase of how many notes they can fit into a second, or how many time signature changes they can fit into a song--rather than the creation of something truly artistic.

I realize that they have sworn off outside producers while making their albums, but I feel like they could benefit from having some diversity of thought and new perspectives in the songwriting process. They didn't enjoy such influences during the recording of Images and Words & Awake, but those albums turned out to be among their best and their most memorable (as you can see from their overall ratings on here). This album is not one of them; instead, it is more of the same aimless wankery I have come to expect from them these days.

thecouga | 2/5 |

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