Review: Dream Theater – Parasomnia

Artwork by Hugh Syme

Style: Traditional progressive metal (clean vocals)
Recommended for fans of: Rush, Metallica, Iron Maiden, virtuoso musicianship, uhhh well IT’S DREAM THEATER, WHAT DO YOU NEED FFO FOR?
Country: United States-New York
Release date: 7 February 2025

Dream Theater, huh? Where do I even begin… Should I talk about the kind instructor at a summer camp who introduced me to them, my subsequent obsession with the band, and eventually progressive metal as a whole? Do I go over their recent history and how often their output has been underwhelming in the Mangini era—an era that has now come to a close with the reintroduction of Mike Portnoy? Or do I discuss their enormous impact on progressive metal? I could easily write a ten-paragraph long introduction if I were to cover all this, but we don’t have all day. What’s most remarkable to me about their new album Parasomnia is the fact that I’m reviewing this in the first place. Now, nearly seven years after I founded this blog, we’ve decided to stop solely covering underground prog. I remember thinking in 2022 that raising our Spotify monthly listener cap to 20.000 was a huge deal (it was only 5.000 when we started!), and today we’re covering Dream Theater?! Well, here goes nothing.

Over the past fifteen years, Dream Theater has developed something of a reputation for being stale and predictable. Leaving aside the dumpster fire experiment that was The Astonishing (mostly—there was a great 45 minute album in there, I swear), the band has by and large played a “back to the roots” sort of melodic prog metal. Mike Portnoy fans hoped that his reintroduction would inject a renewed creativity into the band, but Parasomnia is just as safe as (if not more than) A View From the Top of the World was, just a little heavier and darker with slightly different drumming. I would even go so far as to say that Parasomnia contains so many nods to older work that it almost feels like self-plagiarism. You’ve got the Metallica-esque riffs from Systematic Chaos; dark synths redolent of Black Clouds & Silver Linings; and “Dead Asleep”, whose bridge feels like a rehash of “Beyond This Life”. Then there’s “Midnight Messiah”, whose chorus riff is a less interesting reskin of “S2N”; and the abuse of that same “open the song with hard riffs and dynamic proggery and then let Petrucci lead into the meat of the song with a melodic guitar solo” intro they’ve used a million times now on “In the Arms of Morpheus”, “Dead Asleep”, and “The Shadow Man Incident”. Even the more eclectic parts like the swing section in “A Broken Man” have been done before at this point, such as on Distance Over Time’s “Viper King”. Many bands like to go back and reference their older material, but Parasomnia‘s reliance on these references feels less like fun little easter eggs for the fans and more like it’s patching up a lack of inspiration.

Questionable self-homages aside, Dream Theater doing Dream Theater things as Dream Theater does will always give rise to moments of mind-bending complexity and musicality, and there are plenty to be found on Parasomnia. “Night Terror” is a thoroughly successful track with energetic riffage, interesting verses, and a catchy chorus, as well as an inspired instrumental bridge with an insanely cool solo from Petrucci over a sexy bass-driven groove. Similarly, “A Broken Man” opens with the hardest riff on the album and cleverly recontextualizes its pattern in a number of ways as a guiding thread for the song to build around, while “Dead Asleep” is just a well constructed epic according to the classic Dream Theater formula. On the softer end, “Bend the Clock” is an excellent ballad with an ‘80s feel and a straightforward Gilmourian solo.

If anything, Parasomnia feels like a smoothed out version of their output of the past fifteen years, but molded in a Black Clouds era sound. Vocal clunkers are gone as James LaBrie no longer tries to sing outside his range; Portnoy has ditched the ‘tough guy’ vocals, sticking solely to background harmonies with Petrucci; I spotted no severe cringe in the lyrics; and of course as I mentioned earlier, Dream Theater are still world class instrumentalists. If Parasomnia is your introduction to Dream Theater, I can well imagine the record leaving a big impression on you. For the experienced listener though, Parasomnia lacks both the creativity and the compositional brilliance of Dream Theater’s previous work. All this is to say that nothing offends, but nothing transcends, either: the vocals are fine but mostly unremarkable in lyrics, melody writing, and execution as LaBrie plays it far too safely. Only “Night Terror” has a truly catchy chorus but even that suffers from a monotonous cadence. Compositionally, the band throws way too many ideas at the wall to make much of anything stick, and when ideas do stick, they have to fight an uphill battle to build into anything more than a mere display of virtuosity. “A Broken Man” exemplifies this, squandering an amazingly moody cinematic intro with unremarkable vocal melodies and the most bog standard Dream Theater bridge you can think of whose mood is at best tenuously connected to the rest of the song.

What perhaps annoys me most about Parasomnia, though, is its overall packaging. Prog metal fans rarely give them credit for it, but Dream Theater were quite eclectic for their first twenty years. Whether it was Images and Words with its ‘80s synths and funk influences, Train of Thought’s  balls-to-the-wall approach, or Falling Into Infinity indulging in a ‘90s commercial rock sound, each album had its own distinct identity. Unless you squint your eyes, Parasomnia fails to set itself apart. Clock samples and other nocturnal sounds are interspersed across the record, but they are of such little conceptual value that they add only negligible amounts of personality to Parasomnia. Most of the sampling feels like wasted space used as an uninspired way to give the listener a brief respite from the riff onslaught (“Are We Dreaming?” might be even more pointless than the NOMAC tracks on The Astonishing). Additionally, the pacing on Parasomnia is also off-balance with all the aggressive Metallica-esque riffage and maximalist songwriting of the first five tracks. In terms of pacing, “Midnight Messiah” and “Are We Dreaming?” could have been cut entirely and the record would have been far better for it, as could have the final two minutes of “Dead Asleep” which starts a nonsensical buildup after the song should have ended. Only the penultimate track, “Bend the Clock”, provides meaningful sonic relief, but by this point, it’s far too late.

The astute reader may have noticed that I have yet to cover the closing epic, “The Shadow Man Incident”. This is because the song deserves its own paragraph. “A View From the Top of the World” has yet to grab me, but that aside, this is easily Dream Theater’s least memorable epic. For most of the song, the band is simply going through the motions; again, it’s enjoyable enough purely by virtue of how talented they are, but like the rest of the album, the song has no substantial musical identity to set it apart. Its intro has a somewhat fresh cinematic twist to it, but the “Metropolis Pt. 1” mimicking rapid fire chugs, bog-standard melodic Petrucci solo, and lame “Octavarium” reimagining of the first verses (“I. Someone Like Him”, anyone?) kill any hope of originality. It lacks any memorable vocal lines, too. They’re pleasant and serviceable, but none come close to iconic lines of previous epics like “Seasons change and so can I”, “TRAPPED INSIDE THIS OC-TA-VA-RI-UM”, or (albeit maybe for the wrong reasons) “All the finest wines IMPROVE WITH AGE!!!” The best part is the jazzy piano section starting at 13:06, which might not be the freshest thing they’ve ever done but kicks major ass regardless. Dream Theater in their old age are better at jamming together in solo sections than they are at writing songs.

When the news of Mike Portnoy’s return broke, I, like many, truly hoped that Dream Theater would push themselves further artistically. Instead, we have what feels like the fourth “back to the basics” album in the last fifteen years. Perhaps if it came out after Black Clouds or A Dramatic Turn of Events, Parasomnia would have felt like a solid addition to their legacy, but as it stands, the album rather feels like A View From the Top of the World: Nocturnal Edition But We Got the Old Mike Back So It’s Really Different We Swear. What I really need from Dream Theater next time is the flavorful eclecticism from the old days. This current incarnation of the band is serviceable, but ultimately toothless, so much so that you could be fooled into thinking they wrote this in their sleep.

Recommended tracks: Night Terror, Dead Asleep, Bend the Clock
You may also like: Need, Aeon Zen, DGM, Sunburst, Anubis Gate, Lalu, Vanden Plas, Ostura, Tyranny of Hours, Venus in Fear, Max Enix, Eumeria, Altesia, Vicinity, Avandra, Turbulence, Dimhav, Kaiser’s Bart, The Pulse Theory, Vanden Plas, Guardsman, Lunar, Hac San, Odd Logic, Axios, Teramaze, Dark Quarterer, Etrange, Nospun, Paralydium, Dreamwalkers Inc, Beyond the Mirror, Novena, Vanden Plas, Acolyte, Azure, Atomic Symphony, Daydream XI, Royal Hunt, Distorted Harmony, Redshift, Scardust, Course of Fate, Flaming Row, Aural Cadence, Pagan’s Mind, Advent Horizon, Beyond the Bridge, Maestrick, Roman Khrustalev, Triton Project, Pyramid Theorem, The Vicious Head Society, Vanden Plas, Alkera, Universe Effects, Soul Enema, Noveria, Lost in Thought, Headspace, Virtual Symmetry, Sentire, Hephystus, Dakesis
Final verdict: 6.5/10

Related links: Bandcamp | Spotify | Official Website | Facebook | Instagram | Metal-Archives page

Label: InsideOut Music – Bandcamp | Facebook | Official Website

Dream Theater is:
– James LaBrie (vocals)
– John Petrucci (guitars)
– Jordan Rudess (keyboard)
– John Myung (bass)
– Mike Portnoy (drums)