Artist: Dream Theater
Label: Atlantic Records
Release Date: 1994
Rating: 5 Skulls
Death's Review:
Thanks to the reader who emailed our editor complaining that - after almost six years of writing classic metal reviews for Metal Judgment - one of my all-time favorite albums, probably Dream Theater's best album, still had not been reviewed by the site. This had to be remedied right away. Like the band's most recent album, Train of Thought, Dream Theater's Awake lies on the darker, heavier and ultimately most metal side of the band's extensive catalogue. The band's third album followed up their mega-successful Images and Words (which featured the hit single "Pull Me Under"), and Dream Theater responded to the increased attention and expectations with a dark, aggressive and intense experience that completely disregarded commerciality, radio airplay and MTV. First single "Lie" was as good of a song as "Pull Me Under," but the prog-metal radio lightning in a bottle of the earlier song's unlikely success was not to be replicated.Instead, the band just solidified its core audience as the gods of prog metal with some of their best songwriting and heaviest material ever. Opener "6:00" sets the metallic tone, but is only the beginning, intensity-wise, as later tracks such as "Voices," "The Mirror," and "Lie" are the pinnacle of what Dream Theater has achieved as a band and are primary examples of why I think they are one of the best bands of all-time. I also really like the trippy and mellow but ultimately emotionally very powerful "Space Dye-Vest" which I understand was a song by now-departed keyboardist Kevin Moore (and thus one we won't see much of live). For the musicians, the instrumental "Erotomania" expanded on the "Ytse Jam" and kept the musical pyrotechnics at the forefront once again. All in all, Awake - especially longer tracks like "Voices," and "The Mirror/Lie" - should be checked out immediately by anyone who has ever even had a passing interest in progressive metal, or for anyone who wondered what mixing Queensryche, Fates Warning and Metallica with Rush, Genesis and Pink Floyd would sound like if done very, very well.
As of this writing, Octavarium is set to be released in two days. I purposefully have not heard any of it yet, preferring to buy it on the release date and absorb the entire album in one sitting as my first impression. But I have read that this is a lighter record overall, and am expecting Octavarium to evoke Falling Into Infinity or Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (minus "The Glass Prison") the way Train of Thought was more like Awake. I'm always hoping to hear more emphasis on the darker, more metal side of things, and I'm hoping that there is some of this dark, metal side to the new studio album as well. But if not, I'm still psyched for Dream Theater's appearance on this summer's upcoming Gigantour, as surely they will play a cool set on such a metal bill, and that has to mean that the Awake album will get serious representation.
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