Review Summary: A schizophrenic (fittingly for the subject matter) double album, torn between genuinely innovative and exciting new ideas for the band, and the ever-present navel-gazing of the soloing. When it's good, it's close to Dream Theater's best, and when it's bad
DISCLAIMER: I know this review is long, but it's essentially two reviews; one of the first disc, one of the second. So please bear with me. Now, on to the review.
If I'm honest, I don't really like Dream Theater anymore. If I'm even more honest, they're probably the most ashamed I've ever been of being obsessed with a band. I listened to them like crazy for a few months, and then stopped, barely ever returning to listen again. On reflection, I think a lot of their music is comprised of emotionless, arbitrary technicality, and their more recent albums have been moving further and further away from the good that they had in them. Basically, it's not that I've moved on, necessarily; it's that I've realised that the band is spiraling further and further out into, well, crapness. So, how the hell did this get a 4 from me?
On those rare occasions when I do return to DT's music, it's always going to be a choice between Images & Words, Scenes From A Memory, the title track of Octavarium, and this album. Essentially, their four moments of greatness. Images & Words is undoubtedly their 'classic,' and probably objectively their best work, SFAM is the fan favourite, and a genuinely great album, and the title track of Octavarium is, in this writer's humble opinion, one of the greatest songs ever written. So where does SDOIT fit in? It's their sixth album, following the aforementioned SFAM, and so it had a lot to live up to in fans' eyes. SFAM was an over the top, but gloriously so, concept album set in multiple time periods, so it was essentially a question of 'where can they go from here?' Dream Theater decided to release a double album, which was arguably a pretty bold move. Disc One was comprised of five of their most experimental songs yet, and Disc Two contained a single forty minute song, the likes of which only Dream Theater could attempt and, arguably, pull off.
The first disc might well be one of the most consistently great pieces of music the band have ever made, basically. From the deceptively calm intro of The Glass Prison, to the impressively, coming from DT, emotional outro of Disappear, the disc covers an immense variety of genres and styles, especially considering it's coming from a band who have essentially stayed rooted to prog-metal in every single song they've ever written. Admittedly, the only two real sides to the disc are 'calm' and 'METAL,' but the quintet manage to paint quite a varied soundscape with that modest palette. The aforementioned The Glass Prison is part one of a five song suite about alcoholism composed by (ex) drummer Mike Portnoy, and was, at the time of its release, by far the heaviest song the band had ever written. The first half is actually surprisingly free of technical wankery, despite some ludicrous guitar soloing by John Petrucci, and sets up the album nicely. Unfortunately, the second half of the track is basically a step by step lesson in why a lot of people hate Dream Theater, but it's still a decent start. The Tool-soundalike 'The Great Debate' suffers from this fate, too; it has one of the best first halves in DT's discography (despite the preachy lyrics about stem cells) and actually manages to be pretty experimental whilst retaining the group's core sound. It's all going amazingly well for DT until about the nine minute mark, where all of that momentum is completely ruined by a dreadful transition into probably the most arbitrary instrumental section I've ever heard. But still, they were getting somewhere at least. Also of note is the excellent 'Blind Faith,' a genuinely brilliant song that's marred only by its dismal refrain. But, most pleasingly, it has the one solo section on the album that is legitimately fantastic, and not just arbitrarily thrown in.
The best track on the first disc is the oft-underrated 'Misunderstood,' which starts out as a, once again, surprisingly mature and calming ballad, before ramping up the 'METAL' in not as contrived a manner as one might expect. By the end of the song you find that you've somehow just heard a transition from furiously downtuned metal to a slow motion explosion of backwards guitar solos, which is exactly the kind of experimentation that DT should have pursued in later releases, but, unfortunately, did not. It's moments like the ending of 'Misunderstood,' or the intro and outro of 'Disappear,' or even the first nine minutes of 'The Great Debate,' that makes SDOIT such a frustrating listen; for the first time since Images & Words, you can really hear the band beginning to test the confines of their self-imposed prog-metal prison, and whilst, yes, they do ruin over half of the songs on the disc with terrible second halves comprised of their traditional 'ridiculous guitar solo, ridiculous keyboard solo, etc' formula, they did show real promise, which they haven't ever really pursued in their subsequent releases.
The second disc is, essentially, 'the monster' of an album composed of several ten minute plus tracks already. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how tolerant you are of, once more, ridiculous solo tradeoffs that add nothing to the song. The forty minute track starts off well enough with a Disney-esque (which would seem to denigrate Disney) overture, which introduces some themes that you'll hear not-so-subtly reintroduced, numerous times in the next forty minutes. The song, split into eight distinct parts, does cover some good ground, but, ironically, it doesn't managed to be as varied as the first disc, which is, for DT, a bit of a problem. The heavier numbers don't match up to The Glass Prison at all, and the slower numbers fall miles short of 'Misunderstood's horrifically underrated quality. There are some great moments; About To Crash (Reprise)'s excellent uber-technical, but still fun, take on classic rock manages to win out, as does Goodnight Kiss' restrained (which is the best possible adjective that could be applied to a DT song) solo, but it's a case of more low-quality retreads of ideas seen in disc one, than it is new ideas legitimately being applied to a forty minute song. It does feel somewhat like the band had essentially set themselves a goal to 'write a forty minute song!' then come up with about twenty minutes of music, inserted fifteen minutes of soloing, and then used up the last five by repeating musical themes. Yes, the concept of mental illnesses is actually quite an interesting one, and the themes are at least implemented enough to justify actually being 'themes,' but it doesn't feel like this actually needed to be a forty minute song, which, when compared with Porcupine Tree's similar idea in 'The Incident,' is a big stumbling block for the second disc.
So, there you have it. I'm ridiculously ashamed of my DT-obsession period, but even I'll still freely admit to loving the first disc of this album, other than the solos. Sure, the argument that 'it's just technical wankery!' is a cliched one when applied to Dream Theater, but it's so blatantly done here (see: the second half of The Glass Prison, The Great Debate, About To Crash, etc...) that it becomes impossible to ignore. But other than this failing, the first disc is a really entertaining and, perhaps most admirably, surprising listen, and is definitely worth a try. The second disc will definitely be enjoyable to fans of the band who aren't put off by some of their more... extended... soloing ventures, but it's not got quite enough substance to justify it's hefty timestamp. So, yeah, in conclusion, SDOIT represents what could have been the best turning point possible for the band, but instead serves as a bitter reminder of how close they were to breaking out of the restraints that they'd placed on themselves. Instead of doing that, they released Train Of Thought, and we all know the story from there...
