Dream Theater - Parasomnia (2025)^{Release ID: 57557}

I've been avoiding to many potential "sure-fire" metal albums to get my yearly top 100's more diversified, but this is a new year, and there are some bands I will make that exception for.  Dream Theater was the band that got me into prog metal, and although they're not my favorite anymore, if they've got an album the fans like then I will check it out on the day of its release.  And this is an event to look forward to for fans everywhere, and why?  Simple...

Portnoy's back.

Since Dream Theater mastered the standard style early in their career, we must already deal with some sense of familiarity.  So all that's left is how far they drive it.  And they're driving it all the way from NY to CA.  Some of these bits here are straight-up thrash metal with a strong edge backed up by some of their most clever riffs since Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, and especially Portnoy's drumming.  This is the album where he blew the mercury out of the meter.  He outperforms everybody here without even thinking.  Anything familiar or maybe even only decent about the songwriting is empowered by him.  This is easily some of the best metal drumming I've ever heard, IMO.

As for the rest of it, the short story is that this is yet another "cool" entry into their catalog.  Instead of choosing more meta concepts like the "octave," or telling another rock opera, they went right into a more conventional type of concept.  Much like Metallica's Ride the Lightning covered various forms and themes concerning death, this album's all in the title.  This is probably the perfect theme for Dream Theater of all people to tackle.  I mean, if the band name didn't say it all, albums like Scenes from a Memory should tell you.  Lyrically, they're doing everything they can to bring out the fear factor in each song, almost like we're hearing horror stories but we're supposed to pity the subjects rather than be scared for them.  Instrumentally, even though their riffs aren't always the most original, they're effortlessly heavy and easier to get behind.  Although, once again, Portnoy's masterful performance helps.

Parasomnia seems like a creative splurge for the band, but it doesn't get in the way of the style they developed for a single second.  In fact, I could even say it makes the same mistake as Paramainomeni in the sense that all tracks are following the same goal, but every song shows them doing everything they can at that point to recall the classic era with something a little new.  They never really stopped being relevant, but this feels kind of like a comeback album in a sense.  Dream Theater, ever since Metropolis Pt. 2, has been the kind of prog metal band you need to immerse yourself in, much like a good old ambient album.  And this is the album where they got that back.  No overdoing metal themes like Octavarium, no 2112 knockoffs, just Dream Theater being dreamy and heavy.

Regressive Metal

I have not cared for Dream Theater for a very long time. I think the last good Dream Theater album was Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and that album is over twenty years old at this point. The progressive metal giants have spent the better part of two decades regurgitating the same trends that album portrayed, albeit without any of the passion that made that album great. The hooks became sparser, the grooves were more sporadic, and band solos became way too prominent. Mike Mangini’s arrival as the band’s new drummer on A Dramatic Turn of Events was supposed to be a turning point for the band; they had just wrapped up their “twelve stages of grief” epic that spanned five albums and a change of roster could be just what they needed.

However, Dream Theater gave Mangini only passing status in the band as the rest of the ensemble carried on status quo. My breaking point came in 2016 with The Astonishing, because of how astonishingly boring it was. If you wanted to make an Ayreon album, why didn’t you just call on Arjen Lucassen to make one for you? Despite my trepidation, I did enjoy Distance Over Time with its return to writing memorable songs and not just an instrumental wank for twenty minutes. And you know what else? Mike Mangini got involved in the songwriting! I shouldn’t have been so hopeful that this band would stay in that lane.

After another completely boring experience with A View From the Top of the World, I find myself at the end of the rope. Dream Theater has one chance to surprise me: starting with the return of longtime drummer Mike Portnoy back on the skins. Is Dream Theater back, or is Parasomnia just another Dream Theater album?

The name Parasomnia ]already sets bad expectations; the portmanteau album title has already run its course and yet, both Portnoy’s former employer, Whom Gods Destroy, and Dream Theater are keeping this unwanted tradition alive almost fifteen years too late. The album kicks off with “In the Arms of Morpheus” and my fears are all but confirmed. This five-and-a-half-minute track in entirely instrumental as the members of Dream Theater pass the solo baton around over a handful of entirely unmemorable riffs. No melody is ever presented to the listener and it all just sounds so performative. I mean, of course it does, it’s Dream Theater! But the lack of a returning motif just makes this song feel empty. Leading into “Night Terror” we still wait patiently for a true melodic motif to show up and only after about three minutes, we finally get some semblance of melody. You might wonder how is this any different from the introductions to “Pull Me Under” or Metropolis Pt. II: Scenes From a Memory. Those instances are melodically sound; they stay in their lane until the vocal melody arrives. Beyond that, those grooves return later, representing connectivity, something that Parasomnia does not have.

“Dead Asleep” is a perfect example of a track that could have worked. There is a solid enough repetitive groove here to keep it connected, it has an okay chorus and is produced well. But the introduction is over three minutes of the runtime, it has a solo break that is way too self indulgent for how slow the main groove is and ends on an entirely new groove not shown anywhere else in the song! The only option to keep this groove around is add another chorus, but the song is already over eleven minutes long and I was already dead tired when the final notes faded away [pun intended].

“Bend the Clock” had a chance to be the albums saving grace. It starts off calming enough, LaBrie’s vocals enter over a piano and acoustic guitar groove, and early on too. The song grows into its chorus, which sounds great (reminds me a little bit of “The Glass Prison”), there is a short solo after the second chorus and proceeds immediately into chorus number three. It’s a very typical pop song formula, but it works, which is why it has stuck around for so damn long. But then I realized something that maybe I wasn’t supposed to; during the third chorus I looked down at my song tracker and it showed me that “Bend the Clock” still had another three minutes of runtime. I thought to myself “the song is over; what could Dream Theater possibly do to fuck this up?” Then the key change happened. Petrucci goes into a wank solo that is completely isolated from the rest of the track and the groove modulates into something different as well. It’s unwarranted, it’s uncalled for and it turns something good into something really bad.

“The Shadow Man Incident” ends the album after almost twenty minutes of what I can only describe as a “musical grab bag”. Almost every Dream Theater trope from the last thirty years has been dug up and put into this smorgasbord of a track. You have soft, clean guitar intros, a triplet infused bridge, lyrics that are way too disjointed and disconnected, and an interlude solo break that takes up more than half of the song. The band takes turns at getting a solo chance, and it’s fine, I guess? The showmanship of the band is impressive and basically turns into a lost Liquid Tension Experiment song, but given the band has already shown us this earlier on in the record, it does not hit. This is supposed to be the albums climax and the pinnacle of Parasomnia, but it loses its grandeur because Dream Theater already blew their load about seven songs too early. The album concept? Would be great if The Human Equation didn’t do this same theme twenty years ago.

What happens now? Do I have to revoke my prog snob card because I think the Parasomnia is bad? No. Because to be progressive, you must be willing to push boundaries and go beyond. I have said before that Meshuggah bores me; they are immensely talented, but the music is so bog standard and unmemorable because it lacks focus. Dream Theater are comfortably in the same boat here. You cannot deny the impressive virtuosity of all of the players on display here, but their execution has become so incredibly lousy and uninspired. This is Berklee jazz personified and I'm over Dream Theater now. But like clockwork, they’ll be back in another two/three years. “Are We Dreaming?” no my friend, this is reality; a true, unending nightmare.

Best Song: Midnight Messiah