Dream Theater

Dream Theater Vol. 3 (Rhino)

Excess all areas.

Rhino conclude their Dream Theater vinyl reissue programme with double albums of 2009’s Black Clouds & Silver Linings, 2011’s A Dramatic Turn Of Events and 2013’s Dream Theater, and 2016’s The Astonishing requiring a quadruple.

Dream Theater were formed at Boston’s Berklee music college in 1985 by shred-happy guitarist John Petrucci, drummer Mike Portnoy and bassist John Myung, later adding singer James LaBrie and keyboard player Jordan Rudess. Eventually huge globally, the band have released 16 studio albums and many live sets of their progmetal bombast.

On Black Clouds (7/10), the band’s last album with Portnoy until he rejoined in 2023, four of its six tracks run to more than 12 minutes as they address significant life episodes on titles such as ‘A Nightmare To Remember’ (Portnoy’s dad passed away during the making of it). A Dramatic Turn Of Events (6/10), on which they examine historic events of an uprising nature, highlights acoustic flavours on tracks like ‘On The Backs Of Angels’, recalling 1992’s breakthrough Images And Words. Dream Theater (5/10), heavily influenced by Rush and featuring shorter songs (apart from the 20 minute ‘Illumination Theory’), maintained the Top 10 placings with their most controversial work to date. Economy went out the window with The Astonishing (6/10), the most epic of all their epics, with its colossal dystopian concept opera about rebels challenging music-suppressing rulers.

Reappearing on vinyl will require more getting up to change sides, but that’s a small price for fans to pay for owning such suitably weighty artifacts.

—Kris Needs