gig review

Dream Theater

Two months ago, Dream Theater successfully crammed 300 people into The Troubadour, which is now The Palace – and evidently exceeding its 1,300 capacity tonight. judging by the crush inside. Such is the meteoric manner in which the group are catching on here in the States.

Obviously nobody told the crowd that Dream Theater are a progressive rock band (hardly anybody here would have remembered the seventies anyway), and the band are treated as the new face of metal, with the roaring mob lapping up every virtuoso moment, of which there are plenty, and applauding every time-change in the set, of which there are even more.

Dream Theater take all the adoration in their stride. Half of the players are inveterate finger-watchers anyway, barely aware that there’s anybody at all on the other side of the monitors. Drummer Mike Portnoy, however, was born for stardom; and frontman James LaBrie is getting there too, although he’s yet to learn how to command an audience that is his for the asking.

It’s virtually redundant to point out that the band’s performance is flawless, pulling In all of the last album, Images And Words, plus old favourites (‘A Fortune In Lies’, ‘The Ytse Jam’) from their debut record, When Dream And Day Unite. The breadth of the band’s performance makes it all the more impressive, and the metal heads love it all, even the lilting tranquillity of ‘Wait For Sleep’, although the real crowd-pleasers are the recent hit single, ‘Pull Me Under’, and the similarly-flavoured ‘Take The Time’. But the audience laps up the whole menu, and not just selected portions, lighters held aloft at all the appropriate moments. Dream Theater are clearly here to stay.

—Paul Suter