Dream Theater

I'm with you on most of the album, but I lost you at 'Wait For Sleep' and 'Learning to Live'. The latter is my favorite track from the album.The build throughout is impressive and shows some masterful song writing. Myung's lyrics are at his best and he doesn't reach this level again until 'Breaking All Illusions'. I will say that it took a few listens for me to get the full picture of the song. It is quite a bit to take in. I personally treat 'Wait For Sleep' as the intro to LTL as they share the same themes, somewhat lyrically and musically. If you were to give it another listen I would recommend the version from Live Scenes From New York. They extended the instrumental a little bit in the middle and the outro is a lot better.

Also there's two 'B-sides' to this album. I'm not sure if you're listening to them or are at some point. 'To Live Forever' & 'Don't Look Past Me'. Both are pretty good songs.

My ratings for Images & Words
Pull Me Under: 10
Another Day: 5
Take The Time: 10
Surrounded: 9
Metropolis Part 1: 10
Under a Glass Moon: 9
Wait For Sleep: 9
Learning to Live: 10

Images & Words is one of my most favorite albums by any artist. I could write many paragraphs why, but I don't feel like it.
 
Learning To Live took me a long time to “get.” In fact, most material on the album is made up of growers. It’s very dense, moreso than anything else they’ve done imo. A lot of it is production. They were using a lot of typical late 80s/early 90s techniques like triggered drums, layered guitars, and lots of vocal harmonies. A lot of these things (minus triggered drums) stayed as part of their sound but not as glossy as on here. But all of that plus the extremely complex music makes this a difficult album for newcomers. I feel these songs breathe a bit more live, although the original versions have their own charm. I hope you’ll give the album more spins and allow some of the more nuanced details to reveal themselves to you.

But going back to Learning To Live, it is a fantastic song, maybe slightly better than Metropolis (they’re neck and neck). Learning to Live is one of their most restrained and melodic epics though.

As for the rest of the album, everything minus the first two tracks get 10s from me (9 and 7 respectively). Great album, one of the few where the band’s most famous album is arguably their best. Not my personal favorite but It sits with three others for “god tier” Dream Theater.
 
Take the Time is my favorite song on the album. Super adventurous song playing-wise.

I'd say Metropolis and Learning to Live are neck and neck for 2nd.
 
Take the Time is my favorite song on the album. Super adventurous song playing-wise.

I'd say Metropolis and Learning to Live are neck and neck for 2nd.
I felt the exact same for the longest time, but now I ever so slightly prefer Learning to Live over Take the Time.

All 3 songs are still a 10/10 in my book.
 
'Surrounded' is one of my favourite Dream Theater songs and I am offended by its 7/10 rating. :mad:

In 2017 I saw Dream Theater play 'Images and Words' in its entirety. Although I'm not a huge fan of full album sets this one was pretty cool.
 
Images and Words (1992)

Moving right along, let’s get to the real thing already. This is the crux of the band’s legend, the one that firmly embedded itself as the eternal classic amongst DT and progressive metal in general. And you know what, I happen to really love it. It’s a complete shocker, I know. The music is miles more sophisticated than it ever was on the first album. DT obviously gave this sophomore effort a great deal thought of going in, since they were intent on improving themselves over a naive, shaky debut. And it shows everywhere. This is a vast upgrade in basically every category, especially the vocals now that James Labrie has made his magnificent presence known. The production issues are still kinda there, seeing as the drum sound is...uhhh, polarizing, but this album sounds pretty great all across the board aside from that.

Okay, let’s get to those songs…

1. Pull Me Under

This song saved Dream Theater. That gives it massive bonus points right off the bat. But it’s a very effective reintroduction to the band as the intro captures you with its iconic acoustic guitar riff and slowly envelops you in its mystique before turning heavy and starts pounding away on you. Given that the guitar work on the debut sounded like absolute mud, this is immediately noticeable. I can see why the song caused so much splash in the metal community and on the charts. Anyway, I do like this song, even though I feel the matters surrounding it have overshadowed the actual content of it. The song is almost entirely in 4/4 since the band are clearly intent on first easily capturing an audience who will then be ready for their more complex material afterwards, so the song really is very simple. But for what it is, it works wonders. I guess it could be considered overrated, but that’s pretty much only by the DT fans who are strangely sick of it introducing people to DT despite being a basically perfect way to lure in new fans. I’d say it gets a high 8/10.

2. Another Day

Pull Me Under cuts off abruptly into this little ballad which is quite lifted from the 80s playbook. That may be slightly jarring to some, but I dig it anyways. The saxophone bit is a huge sticking point for detractors of the song, since it’s definitely not something you would expect from DT. Albeit considering this is the second song on their reintroduction album, what expectations could there have been? Listeners back then had no idea of what to expect from this band since most people did not even pay any attention to their debut. So, this isn’t as much DT selling out or being inherently sappy and mainstream, it’s moreso a curveball for the audience to show that DT has more sides to it than heavy 4/4 rocker guys. It’s a smart move, since a lot of other bands wouldn’t want to take such a risk and just do Pull Me Under-like stuff for an full album. That would work fine, but it’s not nearly as exciting. That’s what makes DT such a good PROGRESSIVE band. This isn’t something I feel a lot of fans really think about when it comes to this song. Aside from all that stuff, this song feels a bit brief, like there was more to it that they cut out for time purposes. But it’s a good one nonetheless and a solid 7/10.

3. Take the Time

See what I mean? This song, after two attention-grabbing songs not really representing DT’s actual sound, throws you right into the deep end with a progressive ride that never gets boring for all its eight-minute runtime. There’s just so much to this one and it fires on all cylinders. Quite fittingly, this song’s lyrics talk about DT’s struggles between the debut leading up to this. Now that those struggles are over and done with (for the time being), they are free to do exactly what they want. And I adore it. It’s just a lot of stinkin’ fun. This song is DT at their very, very best. So I suppose a 10/10 is only warranted!

4. Surrounded

This song is absolutely linear in its structure in that it pretty much only features verses, making it another journey of a song that IS a straight line. But it leans heavily onto that structure and is filled to the brim with different dynamic moments to vary it up at every step of the way. So it sounds very progressive yet it’s not at all at the same time. That’s great songwriting right there and this is a song that’s grown on me immensely since I first got into DT. LaBrie’s performance here is topnotch and really where he truly begins shining on this album. He carries the rest of the band through and he’s the main show here. I mean, that’s almost unthinkable nowadays! That earns this one a 10/10 easily.

5. Metropolis Pt. 1 “The Miracle and The Sleeper”

This is where it began for me - this was the first DT song I heard and what a introduction it was! And it’s the quintessential one, the one that has everything that makes DT so unique. Best of all, it manages to do this feat in just short of ten minutes! That’s damned impressive and I love this song. While the lyrics are indeed extremely memorable, it’s the musical content that gives this one its reputation. It’s the first big example of DT really going crazy on the instrumental stuff and it’s still amongst their best. That instrumental section goes on and on but it keeps throwing new stuff at you until you reach the end of it where it trounces you with a intense finisher. Then it wraps up with LaBrie and the band delivering a suitably grandiose finale. That’s how you do it, folks, that’s how you craft the perfect DT song. Third 10/10 in a row, baby!

6. Under a Glass Moon

It still surprises me how actual little lyrics there is on this song. There’s one verse and one bridge, but three choruses which are all the same. It’s something I began really noticing on repeat listenings and it’s more than a little jarring to me. The song comes off sounding brief despite being seven minutes. Anyway, tons of people gravitate to this one due to Petrucci’s solo but I’ve never really been a big fan of the solo. It just never really captured my attention, despite being indeed a good solo. Considering that and everything else I said, I think this song is pretty half-baked yet far from anything I would call bad. 6/10.

7. Wait for Sleep

Best lyrics on the album, although Surrounded is a very close second in that regard. Not surprisingly, it just so happens both are written by Moore. Aside from that, this is little more than a intro for the epic closer that does its job particularly well. Lovely work from both LaBrie and Moore on here. It’s nothing truly special, but it’s still a 8/10.

8. Learning to Live

And here we go - the grand finale! This song really solidifies the album as a stone-cold classic. Myung’s lyrics here are excellent and LaBrie helps to live up to them with his career-defining performance. That F# is nothing to sneeze at, people! And the rest of the band launch this song into the stratosphere and makes damn sure that it wraps up the entire album in a pretty little bow. I can imagine that listeners back in 1992 were instantly demanding more from the band, given that DT made their point clear and shown what they can do. Now they just had to live up to those promises. Regardless of whether they do that or not, this song earns the album its final 10/10 rating from me. Good show, guys!

The Final Score: 8.6/10

That score is a bit lower than I was expecting, but it’s still a respectable one.
 
Thanks! Especially considering that these reviews only take me half an hour to write and I really shouldn't be writing these while in class. Both of them were. I'll make sure to not turn that into a running thing, although I can't guarantee anything.
 
Meh, I thought it was still a little light.

I'm finding it very hard to focus on Dream Theater. I like the music, but it doesn't speak very much to me. Maybe I'll find some of the same things you guys do in repeated listening.
 
Meh, I thought it was still a little light.

I'm finding it very hard to focus on Dream Theater. I like the music, but it doesn't speak very much to me. Maybe I'll find some of the same things you guys do in repeated listening.

You will. I wasn’t sold on Dream Theater for a very long time. You will always find certain songs/albums to be hit or miss, but you’ll most likely come to appreciate them a lot more. Based on your I&W review, I think I already know what songs you could end up loving after many more listens and years.
 
I listened to the Dramatic Turn Of Events at the time it came out, found it difficult to listen to and unappealing. Put down DT for some time. Then one time I had a long drive in my then - colleagues car and we listened to the Scenes Of A Memory, he was talking about the bits he liked. I did not really get the whole thing, but it planted some seeds. I came back to getting the album a few spins at home and it just grew massively. To this day I have difficulties to believe it is humanely possible to write a masterpiece as Scenes, fo me it's not a music album any more, it transceeded to something hard to describe. After scenes I went to Six Degrees and so on and so on and was sold.
 
The drum sound fits the material and the overall production style. There is a remix from 10 years later where they “fixed” the drums and it just sounds weird.

@LooseCannon how much Dream Theater have you listened to prior to this?
 
LC, if you make it all through the DT discography then I hope for your sake that you are one of the people for whom The Astonishing "clicks" because if, like me, you aren't then you have my deepest sympathies for writing a review.
 
Heard the new album. Not great, but far more inspired than I thought it would be. Definitely their second strongest release since Train of Thought, first being A Dramatic Turn of Events.

My favorite on the album was Pale Blue Dot, but I think Viper King may be a good territory to explore for DT. Just a bonus track, but definitely one of the fresher songs on the entire thing.
 
I am new to Dream Theater and so far I like what I have heard. I only have the newer albums.

A Dramatic Turn Of Events 9/10
Dream Theater 10/10
The Astonishing = eating a shit sandwich
Distance In Time 8/10

I think I am going to work my way backwards with their albums.
 
Back
Top