Parasomnia marks a respectable return to form for progressive metal titans Dream Theater.
Release date: February 7, 2025 | Inside Out Music | Official Website | Bandcamp | Instagram | Facebook
Dream Theater is a band I’ve held to heart for more than a decade now, even though their catalogue is not one I revisit too often these days. I’ve gone through it all: Obsessing over Systematic Chaos after discovering them through “In The Presence of Enemies Pt.1”, seeing the band live not long after – further solidifying my love for their spiralling instrumentals and larger-than-life melodies – religiously going through their previous releases and getting baited by the rabbit holes that are Awake and Metropolis Pt.2, basking in the euphoria of finally experiencing an album rollout from them in the form of Black Clouds & Silver Linings, and, like everyone else, grieving over Mike Portnoy’s sudden departure in 2010. Admittedly, this marked a point where I’ve begun to slowly lose interest in the beloved Long Island five-piece. I did enjoy some outputs from their bout with Mike Mangini – particularly their self-titled and A View From The Top Of The World – however it had become clear that their trademark style of prog metal was losing its novelty and just overall excitement for me.
Now, the seminal lineup returns after 15 years since that iteration’s last release with the highly anticipated Parasomnia. Whether it was Portnoy’s return that made me cautiously optimistic of what’s in store for the band or not – I am not exactly sure. But it was certainly a strange feeling deliberately diving into a Dream Theater album cycle once again and over a decade later.
And… I won’t lie, the nostalgia got to me like a quick fix on the first listen. This is, indeed, a Dream Theater record in all its splendor: the bulky metal riffing, the soaring vocal hooks, the extended musical sections leading way to an epic sendoff – they have not lost their sonic identity whatsoever. In the same manner, though, the nostalgia quickly waned and I was left with a band that ultimately seemed too comfortable in its tropes.
Sure, this review come off as yet another case of the be damned if you do and damned if you don’t conundrum artists face all the time. That being said, I wager that it’s noticeable when a band continues tapping into a sound they’ve been perfecting throughout the years while still offering fresh musical perspectives, and when a band uses recycled ideas of said sound and ultimately settling in it. In fact, with Parasomnia you can actually hear this difference from its first two tracks. “In The Arms of Morpheus” serves as a rather strong introduction to the record that showcases their rekindled chemistry with much reinvigoration through its panic-inducing attack while retaining their off-kilter sonic flows consonant to their brand of prog.
Conversely, the following track “Night Terror” sought to remain in the shadows of the band’s hallmark releases: from the drum-led intro and the cadence in the chorus to the extended guitar and keyboard face-offs, I kept catching myself subjected to this oh, this reminds me of train of thought during the entirety of the song. While the track is not bad by any means (I found it to be much better within the context of the album than as a standalone single), the resemblances to previous records were too striking to leave the song be and speak for itself.
That essentially sums up the war inside my head (nope, no regrets with the puns) for the remainder of Parasomnia – a release that held its ground with a solid collection of tracks, but one that ultimately rested on the laurels of the band’s prime. “A Broken Man” similarly engages with these tropes by catering to the melodramatic tension and release of their musical stylings infused with genre-switching passages, making for a predictable track that vanishes out of your mind not too long after listening to it. In similar fashion (and meeting the Dream Theater quota for a lengthy album finale), “The Shadow Man Incident” unfortunately did not hold much ground for me, though there are parts that showcase some of the finest songwriting the band has done in recent years (the chord progression and overall composition of the ‘endless night’ refrain is too addicting).
The lyrics do not help the otherwise intriguing themes found on Parasomnia, either. There’s a lot of grounds to cover with the concept of sleep disorders and how they impact the human psyche under different circumstances, which the band precisely does but the execution in the writing feels so vapid in comparison. For instance, “A Broken Man” explores the overlaps of sleep disorders and PTSD, which is a hefty subject in of itself, but the track’s choice of wording does not do much to hone in on the severity or impact of experiencing such a thing, ultimately leaving no leeway to empathize or overall think much of it. Similarly, the lyrics in “Dead Asleep” is rather uneventful for being a song about a violent case of parasomnia. Even using lines and verses that call back to previous songs is not enough to provide substance to a track about the horrors of sleep paralysis, as is the case with “Midnight Messiah”.
While my listening experience of Parasomnia left me with not much to work with, there are certainly great moments throughout. The aforementioned “Dead Asleep” comes with one of the nastiest riffs off the record and, truth be told, that’s something I should further expand upon: Dream Theater‘s metal spirit is alive and well, with this album laying out a collage of muscular instrumentals supported by a tight production, even so far as to explore other metal subgenres with solid results, as evidenced on the power prog verses on that same track. Similarly, “Bend the Clock” is another instance where they succeed in merging the old and new – the band is no stranger to power ballads, of course, but there’s a liveliness to their performance here that is as resonating as their previous ones in a way that does not replicate them.
After reading this review multiple times, I’ve come to the conclusion that my thoughts on Parasomnia do not come from a place of disappointment, but of the realization of two things: Dream Theater have offered what they had to offer, and that their sound is one that I’ve come to kind of grow out of. I do stand by what I think are the strengths and weaknesses of the record, and my appreciation towards them and the fact that they’ve been formative to my music journey was never lost on me when listening to it, however the sense of attachment I’ve experienced with their other outputs is not quite here, and that’s okay. Apart from the album being a solid enough collection of tracks with some highlights throughout it, I fear that I can’t add further to that.
