PARASOMNIA

I can't tell if I was feeling some Dream Theater's fatigue with the last albums since the departure of Mike Portnoy on drums or if the band was starting to run out of ideas with some predictable prog metal that they give us over the years. Sometimes using the same recipe can be too much for listeners expecting some fresh music. With Portnoy's return, many were excited or curious to see if the band would return to the glory days or give us something different. The first single was something that surprised me with the dark and heavy intro Black Sabbath style. The concept of the album about different experiences of sleep disorder can justify the dark atmosphere of the album. The heaviness is nothing new if we think of Six Degrees or Train of Thought. There are some groundbreaking parts throughout the album as the less exciting parts are rare. John Petrucci delivers some impressive guitar parts including many solos. After 3 strong tracks, "Dead Asleep" keeps the momentum with a nice interplay between John and Jordan. "Midnight Messiah" has a strong Metallica influence with the progressive rock complexity of the band. "Are We Dreaming"? is a cool ambient interlude as the next track has some acoustic guitar before Labrie vocals. We have here the beginning of a ballad with the piano. But then the tempo picks up with every member playing together. We are in a familiar territory here with 2 guitar solos from John. The last 19 minutes track reach another level like all of the epic songs of the band. The intro is an inspiration from the classic song "Mars, Bringer of War". Then the guitar takes us back to the greatness of "Scene from a Memory". James's singing brings the first break with the pace slowing down. There is some great vocal performance here. Mike is delivering his powerful drum parts and Jordan showcases his skill with the keys. The second break displays some impressive drum parts in this instrumental section with many twists which is the trademark of the band. Jordan's heroic keyboard parts and John doing his thing with another fast and furious guitar solo. Then the classical arrangement of another break brings things down before the vocals come back

This is a great album with a solid return to some of the best Dream Theater period. I can see that what Portnoy has brought up to the band is more of an inspiration on the songwriting side than on the technical side. 4.5 stars for sure

Review Nº 873

As we all know, Dream Theater is an American progressive metal band that was founded in Boston in 1985 by John Myung, Mike Portnoy and John Petrucci while they were studying music at Berklee University. They became as one the pioneers of this style of prog with other bands like Fates Warning. Dream Theater is a very successful and charismatic band with fans all over the world. They released sixteen studio albums till now, including this new one, "Parasomnia".

Before begin to talk about this new DT album I need to say something. In a very short time two of my favourite and most important prog bands released two new studio albums. I'm talking about "The Last Will And Testament" from Opeth released in the end of 2024 and this one "Parasomnia" of Dream Theater released this year. By itself, it's a noteworthy event for me. But there are two things that made of this an even most important event. In the case of Opeth we had the return of growls of Mikael Akerfeldt, a very much unexpected thing for many of their fans. In the case of Dream Theater we had the return of Mike Portnoy, a thing that many of us considered unlikely or even impossible after so many years.

So, with the return of the legendary drummer Mike Portnoy, the band released "Parasomnia", a conceptual album that reaffirms their status and shows that, despite the years, creativity and energy remain intact. The impact of this return is evident from the first seconds of the work. With its eight tracks, if there's one thing "Parasomnia" does well, it's finding a balance between instrumental sophistication and the ability to captivate listeners less accustomed to more complex structures. But the album is not limited to technical displays. There's room for different atmospheres full of contagious energy. With a very well balanced work and a band in a perfect shape with landscapes with a jazzy groove and others with a rock melancholy, Dream Theater, with its classic formation, proves, once again, why it's the leader of the genre.

"In The Arms Of Morpheus" is an instrumental track that sets the general tone of the album. This opener sets the dark atmospheric tone of the album with its instrumental prowess foreshadowing the themes and motifs to come. It's clear this is Dream Theater at their most grandiose. It's a powerful warm-up track for a concert opening. "Night Terror" is a classic progressive track, dark, eerie and heavy and where LaBrie's vocals are clear. It dives into the nightmarish theme with aggressive riffs and a memorable chorus, showcasing the chemistry between the band's members and where each member gets a moment to shine. "A Broken Man" has an astonishing energy and an emotional depth, a real descent into pain where Portnoy kill on the drums. The track balances between intense metal sections and more introspective moments, echoing the storytelling prowess of their past epics. It's one of the heaviest tracks of Dream Theater. "Dead Asleep" is one of the two lengthiest tracks on the all album. This is a pretty standard solid track with the classic Dream Theater's sound. It's one of the most focused tracks on the album, ominous, eerie and slightly oppressive. This track is an evolution of the band's ability to weave complex narratives with music. This is a masterclass dark prog metal track. "Midnight Messiah" is a concentrate of technique and power. Those who love "Train of Thought" will love it. The tempo changes and accelerations in particular, take the sound to another level, making us go wild. The interplay between the instruments shows the unchanged chemistry of the band's members. "Are We Dreaming?" is a very short interlude with atmospheric sounds and layered vocals, a moment of reflection with its minimalist approach. "Bend The Clock" is the most accessible track on the album, a beautiful power ballad. It showcases LaBrie's vocal range and the band's ability to craft emotional and melodic tunes. Despite LaBrie is a fine singer, are in these type of songs with a greater harmonic emphasis were he truly excels. "The Shadow Man Incident" is a 20-minute sprawling epic that encapsulates the album's themes and showcases the band's technical and compositional excellence. It has epic solos, hard riffs, quiet melodic sections, blazing fast keyboard work, great guitar solos and LaBrie singing in top form. The track moves through various moods and styles encapsulating everything Dream Theater does best a reminiscent of their long form classics.

Conclusion: "Parasomnia" marks a moment of renewal of Dream Theater. It's well known that the announcement of Portnoy's departure in 2010 marked one of the most dramatic moments in the band's history. With Mangini, the band released five great technical studio works but what lacked a certain creativity and innovation. Mike's return brought a new energy to the band and this is reflected in the way each song overflows with vitality and creativity. I agree with my colleague reviewer rdtprog when he says that what Portnoy has brought up to the band is more of an inspiration on the songwriting side than on the technical side. Besides, he is the real soul of Dream Theater. For me, "Parasomnia" is the best work of the band since "Black Clouds & Silver Linings". With each listen, the album grows on me, revealing new layers and intricacies. With this album, the band reinforces their position as one of the greats of the prog metal scene.

Prog is my Ferrari. Jem Godfrey (Frost*)

It seemed that Mike Portnoy's departure from Dream Theater was a closed chapter in 2010, but surprisingly the prodigal drummer returned to the band to take his place fifteen years later, after which his determination and energy at the helm of the percussions and his compositional talent came to bring a revitalising breath of fresh air to "Parasomnia" (2025), the sixteenth album by the New Yorkers, wrapped since 2011 in a self-referential web that produced five very good albums technically, but with a somewhat dull creative spark.

With a conceptual theme centred on sleep disorders and their various manifestations, "Parasomnia" flows between charged hypnotic and sombre atmospheres, sustained by a rocky rhythmic base built by Portnoy's drums and John Miyung's always diligent bass. From the powerful and disturbing instrumental "In the Arms of Morfeus", a myriad of sonic constructions and deconstructions intertwine in tracks of great forcefulness such as the dark classic prog metal of the nightmarish "Night Terror" and John Petrucci's irrepressible haemorrhage of riffs, the tormented and muscular "A Broken Man" including a brief and inspired jazz moment, the oppressive and murky "Dead Asleep" that contrasts a great guitar solo by Petrucci with the synthesized dalliances of Jordan Rudess, and the raw and powerful "Midnight Messiah" and the virtuoso overlapping play of guitars and keyboards once again.

And preceded by the whispering and brief ambient interlude "Are We Dreaming?" and by the splendorous power ballad "Bend the Clock" with a convincing voice of James LaBrie (of very good performance on the album by the way), the extensive suite "The Shadow Man Incident" unfolds stupendously, alternating emotive peaceful valleys and peaks of instrumental grandeur drawn from the most genuine progressive metal, on a par with other huge tracks like "A Change of Seasons" or "The Count of Tuscany" and with some subtle nods to the magnificent "Metropolis Pt.2 : Scenes from a Memory". An unbeatable closing of what is probably Dream Theater's best work since 2002's "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence".

Very good

4/4.5 stars

Talk about your dramatic turns of events! With Mike Portnoy returning to Dream Theater out of the blue and Mike Mangini bowing out with good grace (so far as we can tell), expectations where high for this album. It's not that the Mangini era of the band is outright bad, so much as it's rather mixed; A Dramatic Turn of Events was pretty solid, but their self-titled album was less celebrated and The Astonishing met with a serious backlash.

Notably, with the latter they abandoned their usual full-band collaborative approach to songwriting, Petrucci and Rudess handling all the music themselves and Petrucci writing the lyrics solo, further contributing to the sense that the well-honed Dream Theater creative engine wasn't quite working as it should. Then again, Distance Over Time and A View From the Top of the World seemed to find the band back on an upward swing - the question was, would the return of Portnoy reinvigorate the band or disrupt them just as their creative process was recovering from the weird experiment of The Astonishing?

Before you even get to the music here, you're confronted with cover art that seems designed specifically to build high expectations. Sure, it's a spookier, gloomier image than we've become used to from Dream Theater (though not so much that it feels completely uncharacteristic), but what really jumps out about it is that it's a big riff on the Images and Words cover; we've got an older girl stood next to her bed, and whilst the surreal features of the Images and Words cover suggested the colourful imagery of dream, here we're stepping more into the realm of nightmare.

So not only is this Portnoy's big comeback, but it's being set up as this big thematic sequel to the band's breakthrough album - if Images and Words was Songs of Innocence, this is Songs of Experience. Lyrically and thematically, this continues right into the album itself; "Parasomnia" is a term for a particular category of sleep disorders, and the songs here are all about sleep paralysis, nightmares, and other things of that nature. It's not a narrative concept album so far as I can tell, but it's definitely a thematic one, with the band taking us all on a thrilling trip through the realm of nightmare.

If the album's cover and lyrics showcase thematic unity, the credits suggest the return of the fivefold creative partnership responsible for the success of this lineup's successful run from Metropolis Part II to Black Clouds & Silver Linings. To the extent that Mangini got credits for songwriting, he did because Dream Theater typically share the credit for all of their musical compositions and generally only go for individual credits when it comes to song lyrics - which Mangini notably contributed much less of than Portnoy had. Portnoy's back on the lyrics again here, and one can only assume that he's settled back into making contributions to the musical compositions too, since all five men in this lineup had become well-used to workshopping ideas with each other.

All of this show of unity and co-operation would come to nothing if the music didn't hold together of course, and I'm happy to report that this is a decidedly strong Dream Theater album. It's not on the level of albums I'd personally put on the absolute tippy-top tier of the band's output - Images & Words, Metropolis Part II, and Octavarium - but it's a decidedly solid effort which refreshes their customary style with the combination of a well-defined and tightly targeted atmosphere and mood on the one hand, and on the other an injection of a few more gleeful retro-prog influences into the mix than we've heard on recent albums from the group.

One suspects Portnoy may have had a hand in that, given that he'd spent much of his time away from the group working with Neal Morse (both on Morse's own projects as bandleader and in more collaborative contexts like Transatlantics), and anyone who's that keen to keep contributing to Neal's prog projects probably has a healthy appetite for old-school prog stuff, but at the same time this isn't so much of a divergence from A View From the Top of the World as to represent an outright repudiation of that album, or the Mangini era as a whole.

Really, my biggest criticism of it is the needless Images and Words nod on the front cover - I think it's silly of the band to implicitly invite such comparisons when this isn't really a throwback to that era. The group aren't rewinding the clock here or pretending the last few albums didn't happen - they aren't hopping back to a pre-Mangini period, it's more like Mangini tagging out and Portnoy tagging in back in, the group carrying the lessons learned forward. It remains to be seen whether this new era of the band will have the staying power of the last time this particular lineup was all together - like I said, the Mangini era did start strong before it got into the weeds a little - but whilst this isn't a revolution in the band's sound, it's still a promising start.

The first studio reunion of the classic DT lineup since 2008! 1. "In the Arms of Morpheus" (5:22) the spacious time-bent opening 90 seconds of this sounds and feels like a soundtrack to one of those child-slasher horror movies. It's very well done--and very effective in conveying disorientation from "real world" reality--even when the full band starts its power chord march through to the 2:45 mark. The chugging motif that follows is impressive for the technical prowess on display from each and every musician. The "mountaintop" motif that opens up at 4:05 is a bit clichéd but definitely reminds us of the "glory days" of all that was 1990s DT. And no vocals! It's totally instrumental. (9.125/10)

2. "Night Terror" (9:55) a slowly-building wall of auspicious gloom turns, after 90 seconds, into a fast-paced run through the dark forest. When the band wants to open up for James LaBrie's singing of the verses they step into a syncopated stop-and-go kind of motif--very effective--but then revert to the smooth-racing run for the choruses. Four minutes in and I find myself totally surprised at the like of pyrotechnics or fireworks: everybody seems to be completely synchronized and attuned to the whole-band wall(s) of sound they're creating. When there is space opened up for instrumental solos, the guitar and keyboard solos are, unfortunately, almost embarrassingly cliché-filled. (Those guitar overdrive harmonics were so 80s!) Still, it is really nice to hear that RUSH-like unity in the eighth minute--and this is the motif in which John Petrucci reminds us of why he was one of the kings of technical metal guitar playing. Great solo highs in the ninth minute! The chorus, which is really maxed-out in the final minutes, is a little too anchored, stylistically and melodically, in 1980s "hair band" sound. (17.875/20)

3. "A Broken Man" (8:30) a song that I enjoy for its steadfast forward motion, even when Mike decreases the number of beats per minute he deploys with his drums; this is an impressive song! While Mike Portnoy is putting on a show for the first two minutes Jordan Rudess's keyboard prowess is in full effect with his "calming"/balancing synth wash chord progressions. James La Brie steps into the fold in the third minute to divulge the story line, he's good--very theatric and committed--but it's John Myung's bass play that now has all my attention--especially when there are any spaces afforded the instrumentalists between James' vocal lines. The metal motif in the instrumental sixth minute is cool with lots of tempo and chord-progression changes as Jordan and John Petrucci take turns proffering their pristine solos (even courting totally different stylistic motifs with each solo stint). Even the bridges are really fun to hear/follow--especially with the various fills each instrumentalist might "sneak" into them. The vocal is good but not nearly as breath-taking as the work of the instrumentalists. (18.75/20)

4. "Dead Asleep" (11:06) John Petrucci really gets some great guitar sounds on this one--which may feed into his inspired-sounding lead solos. The creative interplay between John-John and Mike is so exciting that I find myself pretty much tuning out/oblivious to James' vocal performance--until, that is, the muted effect is applied (briefly) in the fifth minute. The subject matter is quite obviously inspired by both Edgar Allen Poe and Blue Öyster Cult's albums of the mid-1970s (Agents of Fortune and Spectres). Jordan has some decent time in the instrumental mid-section to solo--and he is quite impressive. (I often have trouble appreciating much less "feeling" the emotional keyboard artists are trying to convey with their instruments.) Smooth multi-voice choruses also remind me of BÖC's iconic songs (as well as those of Def Leppard). From a perspective of instrumental virtuosity, this may be the album's most impressive. The song ends with some on-the-water creaking wood noises beneath a piano playing the melody of a famous Nineteenth Century classical piece. (18.5/20)

5. "Midnight Messiah" (7:58) DEF LEPPARD-like musical motif opens this within which a recorded voice is relaying his concerns about how to "really wake up." Syncopated Tech Heavy Metal ensues with John Petrucci and John Myung chugging masterfully along, Mike and Jordan riding along beneath, each adding their own subtle rhythmic and harmonic accents. It has quite a bit of Metallica's "Enter the Sandman" feel to it--though not during the choruses, there it sounds more like Uriah Heep, Iron Maiden, Megadeth or that ilk. This song is one that feels as if the band is kind of "dialing in" a mélange of their most comfortable riffs and styles. Not my favorite style or song. (13.125/15)

6. "Are We Dreaming?" (1:29) gongs, church organ, and tubular bells set up another voice-under of whispered vocals--this time from two actors. (4.425/5)

7. "Bend the Clock" (7:25) opening with some awesome-sounding distorted guitar chords and arpeggi brings me back to times long begone (the late 1960s and early 1970s). When James enters, using a breathy-delicate voice, immersed within piano and strumming acoustic guitars, it is equally awesome/nostalgic. Then they really get going: reviving a sound palette that is so familiar, so comfortable from the AOR Classic Rock bands of the mid- to late 1970s (Styx, Alice Cooper, Journey, or even Def Leppard, Bon Jovi, or Bryan Adams). This is my favorite James LaBrie vocal of the album! And my favorite John Petrucci guitar solo (despite the fact that it is totally old-school pre-80s Metal). Great if "classic" song! Just great! (14.5/15)

8. "The Shadow Man Incident" (19:32) a long intro that definitely highlights the band's unity and discipline--two elements that I consider marks of maturity and effort--the song really kicks into forward motion at the three-minute mark and then really around the four-minute mark when they're finally ready to launch some solos (with John Petrucci's rock guitar starting things off). At 4:50 things are brought down a couple notches--especially in tempo--allowing the tender (though portentous) side of James LaBrie's voice to go on full display. There is an awesome Freddy Mercury-like control and focus that James is putting into each and every syllable/vowel that is very impressive. At 7:50 the guitar and bass suddenly take off: speeding along like a dog suddenly seeing a squirrel. Mike, Jordan, and James follow suit (without missing a beat, of course). The unity is really quite remarkable--as is James' pronunciation of each and every syllable. The melodies are fairly good--especially the "night ? endless nights" ones: catchy and memorable. The instrumental passage begun at the ten-minute mark owes a lot to the twin guitars of bands like THIN LIZZY as well as the sounds of Brian May. In the twelfth minute the band shifts into "catch me if you can" mode with many short ever-shifting motifs and time signatures--the two Johns again shining while Jordan and Mike reinforce, embellish and accent. In the fourteenth minute Jordan surprises us with some classical music themes slipping out of his piano (as the rest of the band holds fast to their hard-driving metal motif beneath!) Petrucci goes off on one of his inimitable series of Lightning Flash flurries in the 15th minute but then the band melts into a bombastic theme for James to re-emerge singing in a crescendo/dénouement during the sixteenth and seventeenth minutes. Petrucci soars and dives in the eighteenth while Mike punctuates every second of the song beneath him and then, with over a minute left remaining on the clock, its over! We're left with eerie water-in-the-underground sewers, echoing shadow man laughs that turn to dripping in the bathroom sink followed by the ringing of a mechanical alarm clock and a "wake up" voice being whispered loudly into your ear. Classic, high-quality DT with very tight formation, classic Petrucci guitar solos, and a wonderful if limited (in terms of minutes) performance from James LaBrie. It's really hard to find fault with this other than it not being my true kind of preferred music to listen to for pure enjoyment. Still, there is no doubt that this is a brilliant product! (38/40)

Total Time 71:17

Though Dream Theater music has always been impressive, it has rarely resonated with my specific musical tastes. (So far, Awake is the one exception: there is something about that album that drew me in from the first time I heard it.) A long break from collaborating with one another as well as maturity may have served James, John, Jordan, John, and Mike well because the music on Parasomnia, while still being as impressive as ever, is both interesting and enjoyable! It may not end up being one of my favorites of the year but it certainly earns high marks for skill and power. (I'm actually a bit embarrassed to see that my favorite song on the album is the one that ticks off the most "retro" marks on the nostalgia scale.) I'm also incredibly impressed how little filler there is with "over the top" bombast and show: this is a band that is showing their maturity by being content with impressing as a whole band more than as a gathering of virtuosic individuals.

A/five stars; a masterpiece of prog metal from one of America's iconic bands reunited one more time.