DREAM THEATER

Dream Theater's second album with Mike Mangini on drums takes the ballsy step of being a self-titled album. There's basically two reasons to do a self-titled album: one is that it's your debut album, and the other is that you think it's a release which really encapsulates your sound. Doing this some 12 albums into your career feels like a big step in particular - it's not that doing this necessarily disparages the preceding albums, but it does imply a crystallisation of the thread that ran through all of them.

As it turns out, though, the choice of title is apt not for this reason, but simply this: "Dream Theater" is about a generic a Dream Theater album as Dream Theater have ever made.

It's not that it's clumsy or bad - it's just that nothing in particular stands out, the band largely continuing to plough the same furrow they'd been working on A Dramatic Turn of Events. That album, in itself, was very much a "business as usual" affair; producing such a thing after one of your co-founders have left and you need to establish you can still go like you used to is fair enough, but doing two in a row suggests the creative well is drying up.

The major exception here is False Awakening Suite, a brief under-3-minutes introductory track which sees the band dabbling in symphonic power metal territory; it's incongruous and could have probably happily been trimmed, but at least it manages to stand out. Here, Dream Theater sound like, well Dream Theater - or any other reasonably competent imitator. And we've got plenty of that already.

I wouldn't say this album is outright bad - but I'd be lying if I said it was great. It's fine to listen to in the background if you are fond of the group, but I'd never make it the first album you listen to. For better or worse, if any album in their discography can be said to sum up what makes Dream Theater, well, Dream Theater, it's Images & Words, their first true classic which set the stage for everything to follow. As for Dream Theater, by Dream Theater... well, it's Dream Theater, alright. But it's just Dream Theater, nothing more than that. And Dream Theater are able to be a better Dream Theater when they reach beyond the unambitious boundaries they set for themselves on "Dream Theater".