Album Review: Dream Theater - Distance Over Time

This reviewer is an unabashed fan of Dream Theater, since the release of Awake way back in 1994, and believes an extremely strong case can be made for naming them the greatest prog metal band in history.

Almost three-and-a-half decades and 14 studio albums into their career however, something has happened to this band that has made their output plateau, level out, not progress (which of course seems inconceivable for such a ‘progressive’ band). Losing the percussive wrecking machine known as Mike Portnoy in 2010 has certainly been a factor in this, but there is something else at play here too. As Mickey says to Rocky in Rocky III, they got "civilised". The members are now all rich, fat and happy. And, sincerely, best wishes to them, they absolutely deserve it. However, it has had an effect on their music. They have lost that conceptual (as on Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory), exploratory (as on Octavarium) and blisteringly angry (as on Train Of Thought) edge that they had, and had in droves, and they now simply seem happy to pump out middling to solid albums every three years or so.

Distance Over Time is far from a bad album. Viewed as part of the Dream Theater canon of the last decade, it’s probably the pick of the lot, benefiting from a harder, heavier sound and a slightly more stripped-back approach. The songs are solid Dream Theater fodder, and of course the musicianship is untouchable. A relatively undemanding fan will probably love it. Longer term/harder core fans, however, may still lament a little that the Dream Theater of the early ‘90s through the mid 2000s is gone forever.