A DRAMATIC TURN OF EVENTS

Let it not be said that Dream Theater lack self-awareness: calling their first album without Mike Portnoy "A Dramatic Turn of Events" suggests that the band were well aware that the loss of such a key member of the group would be difficult to adjust to. Indeed, not only had Portnoy been onboard from the beginning, but this would mark the first lineup change the band had endured since the Metropolis Part 2: Scenes From a Memory lineup had coalesced.

New drummer Mike Mangini doesn't exactly turn the Dream Theater sound on its head here, but frankly he was never likely to - nobody joins a band which is 11 albums deep into its career and generally considered a leader of its subgenre and seriously expects to change the chemistry of the group rapidly. Indeed, the album opener - On the Backs of Angels - is an almost calculatedly "business as usual" Dream Theater number, a piece you could imagine Portnoy drumming on just as much as Mangini.

Perhaps part of this is a by-product of the way the album was developed - with the rest of the group writing it and developing demos with programmed drums in parallel with finishing off their search for a new drummer. As a result, whilst Mangini has some scope here to add a little personal touch here and there, he doesn't make any substantial songwriting contributions at all - which means that on the composition side of things you don't have a fresh perspective coming in, you just have the well-oiled Dream Theater machine minus Mike Portnoy.

So it's business as usual, then - but fortunately, for Dream Theater "business as usual" is still pretty good. I wouldn't put it in the absolute top rank of the band's albums, but it's far from an embarrassment either - it needed to prove the band could still recognisably be Dream Theater without their co-founder, it succeeded and did so better than expected.