LIVE AT THE MARQUEE

Dream Theater are known for their astonishingly long live sets and comparably long live albums. Mike Portnoy infamously collapsed backstage from exhaustion after the gruelling concert captured on Live Scenes From New York, for example, but far from taking this as a hint that perhaps sometimes less is more and a shorter setlist would be better both for the health of the band and the patience of the audience, the band have generally kept at it with the long live album thing.

That's fine if you want big chunky slabs of live Dream Theater, but there's a place for shorter, snappier sets. That's why Live At the Marquee is a nice live release, weighing in at under 50 minutes and offering solid live renditions of a selection of songs from Where Dream and Day Unite and Images and Words, with an emphasis on the latter.

Given the Marquee's role in igniting the British neo-prog wave a decade earlier, where it was a home base for bands like Marillion, it's sort of apt that Dream Theater's first live album should hail from there, since Dream Theater arguably repeated Marillion's trick of creating prog rock on a commercially successful basis at a time when the received wisdom was against this, and the band rise to the occasion with high-quality performances of the songs, including a killer version of Pull Me Under (with an actual ending this time, rather than that abrupt cut-off the album version has).

One might wish that they'd have been able to squeeze in Learning To Live or raise other quibbles with the setlist, but it speaks well of the band that already, at this early stage of their career, they had enough bangers in their repertoire that a single album-length live release couldn't hit all the highlights. Hm - perhaps those long runtimes have a purpose after all. Either way, if you like Images and Words-era Dream Theater and enjoy live albums, you'll find this a solid choice - and in practice, this means it's a good listen for most prog metal fans.