IMAGES AND WORDS

Dream Theater's second studio album, "Images And Words", made them famous with a lot of help from the opening track, "Pull Me Under" that somehow became a MTV hit, but on the same time, the album started 2 important processes: Made an example and wonder to a new genre, Progressive Metal, and updated the old 70's progressive rock.And 7 seven years later, they're reached higher grounds with "Scenes From A Memory", but "Images And Words" is really the starting point.

James LaBrie (vocals), John Myung (Bass?), John Petrucci (6th gear electirc guitar), Mike Portnoy (3 drums systems & 8 hands) & Kevin Moore (the first keyboardist from three until today) decided to come out with a mix between heavy-metal & progressive rock, that back then was a nothing more than a old records on depot. Many things have been written about them being graduate of Berkley's music university in Boston, and this fact is definitely added a lot of to the skills, the impressing sound, and to the virtuosity performence of Dream Theater.

You can argue a lot about the writing level and the modernize of the composing, but any arguements about Dream Theater must include one important subject: The virtuosity! The muscal knowledge brought Dream Theater to a direct, impressing, brilliant & exact playing skills. In all the progressive music lifetime, i've never heard a band in the technical level of Dream Theater. The hardcore of this band is the communication between Petrucci's guitar and Portnoy's drums.

In my opinion, "Images And Words" is not a classic prog album, and it is not challenging the listener. Most of the tracks on this album are bulit in a very traditional way, there are no musical breakpoint, but stiil Dream Theater provide us a supermarket of genres and musical culturs: heavy metal, with a little pop and romance that is accompanied with saxophone ("Another Day") and a lot of progressive. The worst thing that you could say about this album is the fact that you can feel that Dream Theater is working too hard, and even in their coolest tracks, Dream delivers tention, hard discipline, a hard ambition to success and to attract more audience. They don't take to many risks and not trying to add more humor or express themselves freely. But you can't argue with the fact that this album is a milestone on the prog metal history, so in that case i'll give it 4 stars.