IMAGES AND WORDS

It´s not easy to talk about an album that really started a whole new genre. Ok, there were other bands before that started the mix of metal and progressive, and it goes as early as the 70´s (like Kansas in Point Of Known Return) or the 80´s (Iron Maiden´s Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son), but clearly they were eithera Prog band with some heavier moments (Kansas) or a metal band that has a prog influence (Iron Maiden). Dream Theater on the other side was hard to label.

Images and Words was the first real album to be called prog metal because that what it really was. The formula, no matter how many groups before had laid the basic foundations (Queensryche, Fates Warning, etc>) has finally reached a point were you could no longer consider it prog or metal. It was both. A new genre was born. And this album is its most perfect exemple, even by today´s standards. It was a great feat, specially if you remember It was only Dream Theater´s second release (and the first with the great James LaBrie on vocals).

I won´t go track by track on this album, because this is the kind of CD you have to hear to believe (but, please, with no prejudice!). From beginning to end a perfect album that many bands try their whole career to record to no avail. Everything works here: the musicanship is perfect, the songwriting is superb and the production is absolute amazing. Never again Dream Theater would reach such perfction that included simplicity, melody, skills, technique, inspiration, delicacy, energy and guts. So what? Even if they had broken up after this one, they´d had made their names in the prog music history. And, believe me, they did quite few albums after Images And Words (some even excellent like Metropolis). But their sophmore release was truly their finest hour ever.

One of the few albums that stabilished a new era in prog music. An absolute classic. And a must have for any proghead that does not limit himself to traditional 70´s symphonic sound.