Dream Theater - Score

DREAM THEATER
Score
Rhino


Dream Theater have only one thing in common with GG Allin, and that’s the polarized response they generate. Blind love on one side, utter revulsion on the other, and nothing in between. DT make the most pomptastic prog-metal I’ve ever heard, and like Yes with Yessongs (now a double CD, but formerly triple vinyl), Score is a seemingly bloated, potentially ghastly, but in fact quite fucking awesome live set.

A friend of mine went to see Phish play a massive, three-day concert in upstate New York because he’d been scoffing at the band and their fans for years without ever hearing the band, and he decided that he’d been unfair. He returned with a more visceral loathing of them, their fans, and their music than I’ve ever seen manifested in anybody. So when I popped Disc One of Score into the player, I was prepared to be enraged, or maybe convulsed by hysterical laughter. Neither was the case.

Score (which comes in 3CD and 2DVD forms, but not as a composite boxed set) was recorded at Radio City Music Hall to celebrate the band’s 20th anniversary. As if the group weren’t baroque enough by themselves, they’re accompanied on Discs Two and Three by a full orchestra. The set list spans their entire career, and even includes two previously unreleased songs, “Another Won” and “Raise The Knife.” The shortest of the 14 songs is the three-minute “Vacant,” but it’s more than balanced out by the 27-minute “Octavarium” (from 2005’s album of the same name) and nearly 42-minute “Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence.” The studio version of the latter took up the whole second disc of a 2CD set, but here the band manages to wedge three more songs on, despite not sacrificing a second of the original’s fist-pumping choruses, tempo changes, orchestral flourishes, and solos, solos, solos.

Most of the members of Dream Theater met at Berklee. They are all extremely skilled instrumentalists. They write and perform a highly structured kind of prog/symphonic rock that has absolutely nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll as Chuck Berry, or even Greg Ginn, would recognize it. That being said, I love this album. The vocalist’s high-pitched wails, and the endless arpeggios of the guitar and keyboards, and even the drumming, are all thoroughly exhilarating. Listening to this band run through these quite artfully constructed, bombastic but never plodding compositions in front of a rapturous audience is my definition of a quality musical experience. Now, I can’t say I’ll be running out to scarf up their back catalog. And I have no intention of watching the DVD version—live music DVDs bore the crap out of me. But Dream Theater have won me over with this utterly guileless, thoroughly un-ironic celebration of a kind of big, flashy prog-metal many people probably thought died out years ago. Long may they solo.