For Dream Theater, A Complex Formula

It’s not often that a band gets a big new lease on life two decades into a career.

But Mike Portnoy and Dream Theater, the progressive metal kingpins who play the Fillmore Detroit tonight, have gotten just such a break.

As much as he loves to discourse about the nuts and bolts of his band’s music, Portnoy sounds positively ecstatic when he talks of the group’s recent split from longtime home Atlantic Records, where he says it was often taken for granted.

Now with the metal-oriented label Roadrunner, DT is already seeing dividends: Last month’s Systematic Chaos, the New York quintet’s ninth full-length album, rode into the Billboard album chart at No. 19 – the group’s best showing yet.

Systematic Chaos is an exemplar of the contemporary prog-rock sound: the daunting time signatures, the mathematical precision, the high-def production. And there is, of course, the instrumental prowess, led by band architect Portnoy, considered by many the best of rock’s modern drummers.

For decades, prog has toiled as rock’s perpetual underdog. Its rejection by the critical establishment has told us a lot about the standards of rock reviewers, who often value a certain rock attitude as much as any musical aptitude.

But for fans of such bands as Dream Theater, the complexity is half the point. Other band’s followers may be content with a simple, “It rocks!” A Dream Theater fan is apt to speak of an album “bursting with triumphant crests of auditory jubilation, whose zeniths are comparable to anything hitherto released,” as one reviewer wrote of Systematic Chaos on the site BlogCritics.org.

“Our fans have made our career. The fact that we can play the venues we play, tour after tour, without any radio support, is completely based on them,” says Portnoy. “It’s not casual.”

Portnoy and his compatriots have always been careful to distinguish themselves from standard prog rock, emphasizing that they’re as much a heavy metal group as anything else. It was that distinctively tailored approach to the music, he says, that best explains why Dream Theater managed to break from the pack to become the genre’s leader during the ‘90s.

“It was a time when nobody else was really doing this kind of music. Maybe Metallica and Iron Maiden and Queensrÿche kind of dabbled in progressive rock, but they didn’t embrace it the way we did,” he says.

The gates have since opened, notes Portnoy, who points to bands such as Mars Volta, Tool and even Radiohead. But he’s quick to emphasize that life in Dream Theater isn’t all about thevirtuoso dazzle, and says his band is distinguished by its songwriting.

“Contrary to popular belief, since we’re often slammed for showing off or just playing our instruments, the song is always so important to us,” he says. “If you listen to any of our albums, we always concentrate on the melodic side.”