POP MUSIC REVIEWS: Dream Theater Really Should Dream On

SANTA ANA — Dream Theater was the serendipitous name of the opening night headliner Thursday at the Galaxy Concert Theatre; you could hardly dream up a better venue than this spacious, comfortable, 550-seat club, a new acquisition by Gary Folgner, who also owns the well-established Coach House and the Ventura Theatre.

However, there wasn’t much besides the name to make Dream Theater a fitting opening-night attraction. The band, originally formed at Boston’s Berklee College of Music, combined bombastic progressive rock influenced by Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer with gargantuan heavy metal a la Queensryche.

That’s a fairly dubious premise to start with, and Dream Theater accentuated the worst excesses of both styles. Yes and ELP may have had their foolish and pretentious moments (well, a lot of them, actually), but they offered pop melody along with progressive flash, and both could perform with delightful panache and a showmanly flair that Dream Theater utterly lacked.

The four instrumentalists in a lineup of guitar, bass, keyboards and drums devoted their considerable technical ability to music that had little purpose except to show off, while singer James LaBrie inflicted the worst sort of bleating operatic heavy metal vocal excess. Memorable melodies were few; emotional content was thin. Handy labels aside, there was nothing progressive about it.