METROPOLIS PART 2 - SCENES FROM A MEMORY

This album is absolutely the funniest cheese- metal I have ever had the intense pleasure of hearing. Listening to supremely talented, virtuoso musicians making the most childish, inept music the world has seen brings tears of laughter to my eyes every time. It is actually worth owning because of its humour value - no joke, the album is that funny. I would go so far as to call it life-affirming.

The opening is hideously contrived (beginning with the positively obscene idea of a hypnotist inviting the singer to return to his troubled, manly, tortuous, manly dreams) and nearly put me off the album altogether, until I realised it is but one thread in a complex tapestry of awful that will take you on an epic tour of bad ideas you never would have imagined possible.

DreamTheater (ha!) seem to think that the more notes they can cram into a given time, the better the solo must be. Not so! No more impressive is the positively absurd drumwork of Portnoy, who uses approximately 7 bass drums, 143 snare drums and 415 cymbals in his standard drumkit. He even has a stool on a sliding rail to reach all 7 bass pedals. I think that tells you something important.

If you want all the humour without living with the shame of buying this, instead get tracks 8 and 9. These condense the mirth by working backwards through every single moronic riff featured in the previous 7 songs in what the band presumably thought was a clever, cyclical aspect to the album's structure. In fact, it is a way of meeting the total record time stipulated by their record company. These songs also feature the most mind-bogglingly ridiculous pasted-in solo in the whole album. A Ragtime Piano Interlude. No, that is not a typo - a RAGTIME PIANO SECTION. That is something I could not have comprehended before I heard this album - that any band could so lose sight of the Purpose of music-making, as to insert something so heinous and random, just to prove that their keyboard is expensive enough to have a "honky-tonk" setting in its MIDI bank.

Well, there are of course many more comedy gems concealed in this album (the abrupt insertion of sitars and tablas to show DT's "eastern influences", the laugh-out-loud funny wooden acting at the end, the ridiclous lyrics and complete lack of atmosphere throughout... oh, the memories) I only have 1,000 words and that is not nearly enough to do this album justice.

In conclusion, this is practically a comprehensive guide on how NOT to make music. It proves once and for all that there is not necessarily any correlation between "technical ability" and "ability to make an album that isn't terrible". It should provide a solemn warning to future generations - but in the meantime, let's all just enjoy it for what it is - a monstrously pretentious, thorougly enjoyable piece of pomposity!

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