Dream Theater

Rule 96: in case you were wondering, Dream Theater are and will always be the benchmark for prog metal. The more an album sounds like 'Images And Words', the more progressive it is.

(from "The 101 Rules of Progressive Metal")

Who remembers that tongue-in-cheek document that circulated online some fifteen years ago?

Those were the days of bloody skirmishes on music forums, with Facebook still a distant mirage. One of the fiercest battles was undoubtedly the one between those humorously branded "riccardoni" (Rick Wakeman-worshippers) and those who simply couldn't stomach the kind of instrumental self-indulgence typical of virtuoso musicians. Who knows which faction the author of those 101 rules belonged to, but they clearly knew all the stereotypes, anecdotes and convictions swirling around what turned out to be a surprising resurgence of the progressive ecosystem: prog metal.

An unexpected boom, since it arrived straddling the 80s and 90s, when progressive rock was far removed from the glories of its golden Seventies. Some had already tried to keep that dying flame alive, thanks to the so-called neo-progressive movement of the Eighties, but few of those acts achieved commercial success on a par with what came before the watershed year of 1976. Among the likes of IQ, Pendragon, Pallas and Twelfth Night, Marillion undoubtedly reached the widest audience but, ironically, right at the start of the Nineties they inaugurated a stylistic shift as fascinating as it was riskily distant from the tropes they'd represented until then, one that took them away from the big stages they were used to.

The early Nineties were thirsty for the grunge of Nirvana, for Britpop, for singer-songwriters who had just broken through like Tori Amos and Bjork. What was in vogue was the sensual, glossy sound of "Achtung Baby", certainly not scale exercises or solos from whichever guitar-obsessed showoff happened to be around. Or else there was heavy metal, which hadn't been shy about winking at progressive rock in previous years: it's hard not to think of the solemnity of "Seventh Son Of A Seventh Son" by Maiden, but that progressive attitude the Iron Maiden had reached, though it always remained latent, was brutally walked back right afterwards by the disappointing "No Prayer For The Dying".

And yet progressive proved once again that it simply refused to die; like a weed, its ever-lively haters would say. For a few years already, Queensryche had been mocking the theorem that a band from Seattle was somehow obligated to play grunge (before belatedly giving it a shot in 1997 with "Hear In The Now Frontier"), scoring a huge hit in 1988 with the concept album "Operation: Mindcrime". But, despite the record's massive success, that high point wasn't a work so blatantly inspired by the progressive rock of old that it could become its new standard-bearer. Fates Warning were already aiming more intensely at the fusion of metal and prog, first hinting at it that same year with "No Exit" before spelling it out from "Perfect Symmetry" onward.

But the spark that would finally bring the old, much-maligned progressive genre back into the spotlight was still missing.

Among the aforementioned "thinking man's" metalheads, there was one band still green and uncertain of its future. Three students at Boston's Berklee College Of Music, John Petrucci, John Myung and Mike Portnoy, together with childhood friend Kevin Moore, an introverted pianist/keyboardist with a background in classical studies, already had an interesting 1989 debut under their belt. That record, "When Dream And Day Unite", already showed off remarkable technical chops combined with an unhealthy passion for all those dinosaurs who'd been big in the Seventies, but it wasn't enough to stop them getting dropped by Mca Records.

It was only after parting ways with then-vocalist Charlie Dominici, deemed unsuited to the band's ambitions, and after a two-year search for the perfect screamer for their purposes – Canadian singer Kevin James LaBrie – that they wowed ATCO Records with a demo and finally got the chance to turn their lives around.

Back then, stuff like guitar solos wasn't really in fashion, and we had this feeling like, "Oh, we've arrived too late!". But somehow the album took off and we managed to break through.

(John Petrucci)

"Images and Words" came out on July 7, 1992. Its eight tracks, long, some very long, carried with them every effective trick the trio of Boston students had learned, combined with the expressive touch of classically trained Moore and LaBrie's tenor power. Songs that shamelessly plundered the Rush playbook – with young Mike's hard-hitting drums following in the footsteps of his idol Neil Peart – and a certain brand of Aor courtesy of Kansas and Journey, in all its pompous symphonic glory. This didn't rule out plenty of riffs indebted to Metallica, Megadeth and the rest of the metal crowd, as well as some flirtatious power ballads.

A record that, deep down, didn't invent anything new, recycling solutions dreamed up ages before on other shores – first and foremost by Rush themselves – and merging them with metal, as the aforementioned Queensryche and Fates Warning had already experimented with. The band's many live tributes are, after all, a kind of candid, proud confession of this very fact.

So why did this artifact, "Images and Words", made by these insolent Americans, so forcefully impose its influence on prog-metal for the following twenty-five years, to the point of deserving a commemorative tour in 2017?

The secret of this record, whose formula is coveted by all its numerous imitators, lies instead in its stunningly effective ability to sum up every stereotype of its reference genres into one irresistible formula: the speed and physical overkill of metal, the guitar hero of the moment Petrucci, the twisted architecture of art-rock, the orchestrations and keyboard flourishes of symphonic prog, the unhinged vocal power of Aor, and the melody-centric approach of hair-metal straddling the late 80s and early 90s. All held together with a miraculous balance between these components, each one referencing its own sacred monster from the past, but with a personal touch that managed to go beyond mere quotation – a magic that would gradually be lost in the years that followed.

Despite its brazen, showy technicality, "Images and Words" offers up a batch of eight songs that truly deserve to be called songs. Not, then, a shapeless mishmash of scales, solos and assorted pomposity, as one might assume from a first distracted (or disgusted?) listen, but rather a project that leaves very little to chance. The idea that certain flights of fancy are random is merely an illusion: the sudden mood shifts, the exhausting counterpoint between sections rich in odd time signatures and surprise touches (between funky episodes and Spanish-flavored guitars), the melodic openings and languid slow passages alternate naturally, revealing a fluidity of composition one would hardly expect from such an entropy of stylistic solutions.

So we get strongly distinct songs, each with its own personality: from the metal anthem "Pull Me Under" to the epic, theatrical, girl-pleasing power ballad "Another Day"; from the funk-tinged schizophrenia of "Take The Time" to the intellectual (and thoroughly Rush-like) suite "Learning To Live"; from the fake sentimental pop of "Surrounded", treacherously halting and marked by the exquisite rhythmic sleight of hand "Light to dark/ dark to light/ light to dark/ dark to light", to the (believe it or not) minimalism of "Wait For Sleep", which, despite its distinctive character, lends its title to the record.

But the quintessence of the cliché lies entirely in "Metropolis: Part I", a tongue-in-cheek title that only the band's massive success eventually turned into an actual sequel (the fine "Scenes From A Memory" from 1999). "Metropolis" is perhaps the most representative testament to the aesthetic principles of prog-metal, thanks to its blustering epic scope and the immense instrumental section that has trained legions of young aspiring virtuosos on bass, guitar and keyboards. In this regard, another balance that fueled the success of this record lies in the technical contribution of all five members, each getting a generous, equal share of the glory, as if it were a year-end recital.

However, the baroque artistry of "Images and Words" isn't spent solely on virtuosity, but also on a score densely packed with ornamentation: the brushstrokes Petrucci scatters everywhere, the constant rumbling of Myung's bass, Portnoy's overpowering drums, and Moore's keyboards, as much a protagonist as the guitar and one of these Americans' biggest distinguishing traits compared to their contemporaries.

A special mention goes to Moore, the bearer of the band's romantic side, whose surprise departure in 1994 would set his former band on a gradual descent into what would, over the years, take on the shape of a mere circus of virtuosity, set against their growing commercial glory. Meanwhile, the Long Island pianist would cast off the "proggy" excesses to dive into his deep-seated electronic and Amos-like passions, turning out, as Chroma Key, his own personal masterpiece "Dead Air For Radios" (impossible not to hear echoes of "From The Choirgirl Hotel", released just months earlier by the goddess of rock). Later on, Fates Warning, probably influenced by his work on "Images and Words", would lean heavily on his keyboards to reach their creative peak with "A Pleasant Shade Of Gray" and "Disconnected", two works that rightfully belong in the progressive rock pantheon.

The obsessive, over-the-top approach of "Images and Words" goes beyond strictly musical matters, though: note the lavish artwork, the abstract lyrics stuffed with symbolism, the playful conceit in the booklet where music and lyrics become "images" and "words", and the heavy use of cinematic samples, like the famous "Ora che ho perso la vista, ci vedo di più" (from "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso") that was all the rage in Italian high schools among newly minted teenage listeners at the time. All signs of the burning, playful enthusiasm of a band determined to break through at any cost, and of a creativity never again quite so alive and effervescent. A record released at the worst possible moment, tremendously old-fashioned. And yet, to everyone's great surprise, a hit – even in the way it became one: it wasn't the crowd-pleasing "Another Day" that turned into the calling card, as the five young men had expected, but rather the heavily censored radio edit of "Pull Me Under" that ended up in rotation on MTV and helped secure the long-awaited gold record.

It's clear how "Images and Words" managed to fill an apparent void with a marketable, appealing formula, one largely replicated on the 1995 EP "A Change Of Seasons", which contained the mammoth title-track suite dropped at the eleventh hour from this album's tracklist.

Its successor "Awake" actually managed to do better in many respects, starting with the production, the real Achilles' heel of this 90s gem and a testament to the extremely difficult relationship with then-producer David Prater. As Mike Portnoy never fails to recall:

I told Prater I hated sampled sounds, but he did everything his own way and triggered my drums on 'Images and Words'. A flat sound with no dynamics, as usual for him, and all the finesse and touch disappeared during the mix. A lot of people thought my drums were programmed, when in fact it's all played live!

But "Awake", despite aging better thanks to stellar production and some of the best songs in the band's history, loses out by the narrowest of margins, achieving its maturity and self-awareness at the cost of a lost innocence: that cheeky, volcanic, colourful brashness which, with "Images and Words", set the standard for progressive metal, while also having the unfortunate side-effect of spawning a legion of musical-notation zealots that would soon make Dream Theater one of the most loved and most hated bands at once on today's music scene. Hard to be more of a landmark than that…

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22/10/2017