Dream Theater

When a rock band releases a nameless album late in their career, this is often a confident statement; many bands have released nameless efforts that were not necessarily their best but surely their most definitive albums; think of The Beatles, Metallica, and Led Zeppelin, just to name a few.

So when the undisputed kings of symphonic metal decide to simply name their twelfth studio album Dream Theater, that creates quite some expectations.

Unfortunately, Dream Theater is not as good as its lack of title implies.

The album gets off to of an underwhelming start with the instrumental “False Awakening Suite”, but then things get underway with “The Enemy Inside”, which is Dream Theater at its most powerful.
“The Looking Glass” is so catchy it could actually get some airplay on classic rock stations, but after this promising start only one more song on the album is up there with the band’s best work. This is “Behind The Veil”, which after a slow start unveils the album’s strongest riffs.

As with every Dream Theater album the musicianship of these five virtuosos is of such an insanely high level that it’s just sheer ridiculous. But the most impossible achievement of this five-piece is still that they are arguably the only band ever that managed to make symphonic metal sound exciting and accessible, with albums such as 1992’s Images And Words or 1999’s Metropolis Part 2.

This nameless records doesn’t reach the heights of those classic albums, and therefore doesn’t live up  to the expectations the band itself created.

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