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Dream Theater - Cleaning Out The Closet CD (album) cover

CLEANING OUT THE CLOSET

Dream Theater

 

Progressive Metal

3.12 | 70 ratings

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jampa17
Prog Reviewer
3 stars Demos? Yes... only for fans? Maybe the opposite...

We have here a collection of "B" sides, songs that didn't made it to find a place in the Images and Words, Awake and Falling into Infinity albums. Something special about it? Yes, many things, so lets see:

The first four songs have the great sound appealing of Kevin Moore, and the lyrics of "Don't Look Past Me" are from him and are quite good and touching, he was a great songwriter. The soft paced "Eve" is an instrumental track filled with a lot of emotion and sadness. The rest of the album is made of songs in which Derek Sherinian was involved. Most of them are some kind of prog-pop songs. Many of them have less busy melodies and the instruments are a lot more relaxed than what they use to show in the regular songs they compose.

It's evident that DT was passing for a time in which they really wanted to sound more radio friendly but all of the songs ended up feeling a little messy, too complex for a pop success, but too simple to be progressive, at least in the regular stuff DT made. This are demos so, of course the songs are not finally made, so, if those get to pass the test to be in an album, probably those should be reworked a little to be more consistent, but it's very interesting how DT guys can really make radio friendly songs without loosing the touch.

Highlights: Don't Look Past Me, Eve and The Way It used to Be. The rest are just good but average songs. I think this material is better to non-DT fans but regular alternative rock fans. Good stuff, not too complex but entertaining enough, and there's a lot of emotion on the songs. The sound quality is very good for been demos and shows very well the progress of the composition of DT. Three stars is quite accurate.

jampa17 | 3/5 |

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