A DRAMATIC TURN OF EVENTS

Dream Theater's 11th studio offering, A Dramatic Turn of Events, marks the first album by the band after drummer and founding member Mike Portnoy left the band. Many people view it as a return to form, after the heaviness of their last two albums, Systematic Chaos and Black Clouds & Silver Linings. Some see it as another album filled with songs that are too long with too much soloing and noodling. I see this album as both in a way. Let me explain.

There's no doubting the talent and skill of the members of Dream Theater. All 4 instrumentalists are virtuosos and have been known for this for a long time. We're certainly shown this on the album, in sections such as the first few minutes of "Lost Not Forgotten", which to my ears is just bland, pointless soloing that really does not need to be there at all, and it just takes away from the whole song in general. I'll go into that deeper later on.

The songwriting on this album is fairly good, but it won't blow you away. It's not really any better than any other albums, or any worse.

The concept and title of the album seems like a direct reference to the leaving of former member, Mike Portnoy, but the band insisted that this is not the case; instead they were inspired by several happenings around the world (such as the Libyan uprisings) to write about how people and communities cope with change. This theme isn't really that prominent in the lyrics on this album. Most of the lyrics are quite similar to other Dream Theater lyrics (meaning they're not that good). There's a lot of stuff that doesn't really mean anything. But then there are songs like Breaking All Illusions, whose lyrics were written by John Myung, which have quite intriguing lyrics. They don't really seem to mean too much, but the concepts thrown around are interesting.

The album is fairly consistent within itself, and also when compared to the rest of Dream Theater's discography. There's a lot of the instrumental noodling that I mentioned earlier, which quickly becomes irritating. These sections are mainly found in the long songs. Talking about length, this album goes for just over 77 minutes, which is consistent with their other albums. But the problem is, when you want to fill up a complete disc, it's hard to do it with shorter 'to-the-point' songs, so what Dream Theater usually end up doing is filling up the disc with the instrumental soloing. I wish they would just make an album that was less than an hour long and didn't have heaps of long songs that are slightly aimless.

While it might seem from this review that the album isn't that good, that isn't completely true. There are some truly wonderful moments, like the lush, Pink Floyd-esque opening to On the Backs of Angels, and the melancholic, emotional beauty of Far From Heaven.

Overall: This is a fairly good album by Dream Theater, but has its weak moments, and doesn't contain anything that we haven't heard before. 7/10 = 4/5 when rounded up