Dream Theater: Dramatic Turn of Events review

You realize it by the time the first bridge on ‘On the Backs of Angels” cascade from the player. Any Proggie who’d heard even a whiff of Images and Words or, wahatthehic, a snippet from those legendary – if exhausting – rehashes of The Metropolis series, could smoothly tell Mike Portnoy wasn’t just a “drummer.” He was a musician who played the drums. 

Art and Dream Theater is a cliché. And as naturally with all clichés go, progression can often deceive one into confusing kitsch for art. The whole idea is just to convince you that academic eclecticism is actually integral to projecting an image of intelligent music. And fail – because the whole point was just to convince. A Dramatic Turn of Events is an amazingly perfect instance. 

Why would you miss Mike Portnoy? Because the Prog masters of the world have now decided that melody promises more retrospection then music can offer melodies.  Nowhere there where Images and Words and Train of Thought are A Dramatic Turn of Events won’t be amongst my all-time list. DT’s 12th studio album isn’t even 1,000 miles anywhere near the phenomenal edifices of musical history the band built. Listening to On Backs of Angels or the velocity opus of Breaking All Illusions, your nostalgia for the good old days grows even deeper. It doesn’t sound like A Mind beside Itself or Lifting Shadows off a Dream or Caught in a Web or even Under a Glass Moon. What the hic, it doesn’t even sound like Dream Theater. It sounds like a band on the edge of falling under its own illustrious history. 

The missing-something-here element in the album is palpable. Is it Mike Portnoy? Or is it the band’s plunge into the greater – if unknown – symphonic power-driven melodic direction? Is it Jordan Rudess’ and John Myung’s newfound frontline presence on the lyrical front after the exit of the master songwriter and craftsman? 

Or is it Mike Mangini? For someone notorious for his almost phenomenal technical insights that rewrote the best of funk and clunk but nowhere near the high brow credentials of Dream Theater, Mangini’s work on A Dramatic Turn of Events is almost poetry in motion. To appreciate Mangini’s first effort with Dream Theater, one need to read over his hedonic excesses with 80s funk rockers Extreme or guitar Raja Steve Vai, his former employers. Then you’ll have an idea what art Mangini has created with Labrie’s men of culture. Wine? I don’t think so. But he did a good job.

BUT Just listen to Pull Me Under and you suddenly realize even the band is feeling that something is missing thing. In fact they revisit the real glory days of classic Dream Theater and – surprise, surprise – even Mull Muzzler, Labrie’s side project. Hear Under a Glass Moon in Lost Not Forgotten, and hear As A Man Thinks (from Mull Muzzler) in Outcry. Now you aren’t the only one missing Mike Portnoy. In fact, ironically I just got a fan newsletter that said ‘James is missing Mike Portnoy!’ I love the purists.