Dream Theater

1999 is a pivotal year in the history of Dream Theater. After keyboardist Kevin Moore's departure and the arrival of Derek Sherinian, the band released the essential EP "A Change Of Seasons" (1995), featuring a phenomenal old-school progressive suite (the title track), and "Falling Into Infinity", an LP that tended to split the fanbase despite containing plenty of good ideas. It's a moment of pause for the band, a period in which Portnoy and Petrucci try to channel their most extreme ideas into Liquid Tension Experiment, an instrumental, ultra-technical project formed alongside Tony Levin (King Crimson) on bass and keyboardist Jordan Rudess. It doesn't take long to realize that Rudess is the perfect keyboardist to chart a new course for a band that risked hitting a dead end.

Nimble, endowed with extreme technique, capable of reconciling melody and virtuosity — essentially Petrucci's keyboard alter ego — Rudess is in fact the missing piece Dream Theater needed to face the new millennium, so perfect a fit that, twenty-two years on, he remains an irreplaceable element in the band's ongoing direction. Rudess's arrival leads to "Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory" (1999), a concept album beloved by all fans, the culmination of their '90s output, but also a springboard into a new era. Melody, technique and top-tier lyrics find a new synthesis.

This phase is defined by the instrumental track "The Dance Of Eternity", a point of balance and arrival for a truly extreme approach to progressive metal, a sort of super-progressive in which odd time signatures alternate in a frantic, breakneck fashion, where speed-picked guitar intertwines with classical-tinged sonorities, where ragtime piano rhythms cross paths with metal distortion. "The Dance Of Eternity" is a genuine flight of fancy in the career of Petrucci and Portnoy's band, the moment when their core ideas are pushed to their most extreme consequences. Even the shy Myung delivers one of the most important solos of his career, carving out space within such meticulously organized chaos.

It's a kind of anti-melodic manifesto, the most anti-radio track imaginable, but also a hymn to the compositional freedom of a musician who seeks neither easy melodies to win over the audience nor experimental noise-mongering to flatter the critics. It's curious that such a point of balance among the band's three souls (Petrucci, Rudess and Portnoy) was already achieved on their very first album together. "The Dance Of Eternity" is in some ways the crowning achievement of a career and, at the same time, its premature end — both for Dream Theater and perhaps even for the very idea of that kind of progressive metal. It's something like the long coda to what had been the three bullets that struck prog rock through the heart. From "Red" by King Crimson to "Tales From Topographic Oceans" by Yes, all the way to the swan song of Elp, "Fanfare For The Common Man".

By posing the question "What more can be done now?", "The Dance Of Eternity" is, in its own way, the fourth and definitive fatal wound. It's only the beginning of a new era for a band with a long history, spanning more than twenty years of ups and downs. But despite various attempts, only rarely will the Long Island quintet come close to such beauty again.

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08/04/2026