Dream Theater – Distance Over Time (2019) album review

Track listing:

1. Untethered Angel (6:15)
2. Paralyzed (4:18)
3. Fall Into the Light (7:05)
4. Barstool Warrior (6:43)
5. Room 437 (4:24)
6. S2N (6:21)
7. At Wit’s End (9:21)
8. Out of Reach (4:05)
9. Pale Blue Dot (8:26)
10. Viper King (4:01) [Bonus track]

I previously posted this review on social media, before I started this blog. This album was released in February.

After 2016’s The Astonishing double album, I was 90% checked out on Dream Theater. With the release of their new album Distance Over Time, I’ve scaled that back to around 75%.

I’m sure there are DT diehards out there, with neckbeards down to their Mountain Dew-greased bellies, who will claim that The Astonishing, the band’s overblown 2 and a half hour concept album about some Fable II RPG bullshit and some daring militia trying to resurrect music in a society that has outlawed it, is truly one of the band’s masterpieces. The rest of us, however, desperately hoped that Dream Theater would never attempt such an idea again, even given the success of their previous concept album, 1999’s brilliant Scenes from a Memory. I have no doubt that Dream Theater themselves are quite proud of the work they did on Astonishing, but even they recognized that it was time to leave the dead horse they’d been beating to bleed and rot in the sunlight, so their work on a 14th album, per usual, started without any delay following the supporting tour(s) of their newest album. They were right to promise their fans that their next release wouldn’t be conceptual nor would it be a double album, but that still begs the question, is that enough? Does it even matter anymore what kind of album Dream Theater makes?

For many of you, probably not. Many might even be wondering why I choose to listen to such wankery, a band so passionately and devoutly worshiped and defended by basement-dwelling prog elitists who think that Rush was the greatest thing to ever happen to rock music, and Dream Theater in turn to heavy metal. But in being true to myself, I like whatever sounds good to me, regardless of who else is listening to it. If that means Dragonforce comes up on a playlist alongside the likes of Chris Stapleton and Phil Collins, then so be it. And Dream Theater, pretentious and long-winded as they tend to be, do occasionally get lucky and write something worthwhile. That being said, they haven’t made a great album since original drummer Mike Portnoy left the band in 2010, in fact their last great album in my opinion goes as far back as 2005 with Octavarium. I keep hoping for a significant enough evolution in their sound to justify their intense work ethic, because let’s face it, at the technical caliber they’re playing and writing music, for them to consistently keep releasing an hour long album or more every two or three years is pretty remarkable, like them or not. But 2011’s A Dramatic Turn of Events and 2013’s self-titled album both fell just short of that mark, and 2016’s The Astonishing, if I haven’t been clear already, was just a disaster. So what’s the story on the new one, which just happens to be the shortest DT album (still almost an hour long) since their 1989 debut?

Firstly, Distance Over Time (so, speed?) easily succeeds in bouncing back from the wreckage of its predecessor, returning to a recognizable, more classic DT sound and far less sappy balladry. Technically the band is still performing at the highest level possible, though James LaBrie continues to age and succumb to his limitations with each album. The songwriting hearkens back to earlier albums like Train of Thought (2003), Octavarium, and Falling Into Infinity (1998) in songs like “Room 137”, “Paralyzed”, and “S2N”, and with mostly shorter songs overall (none of them surpassing 10 minutes in length) the band keeps their extended instrumental suites reined in, so it’s not as suffocating as it has been. The singles, namely “Untethered Angel” and “Fall Into the Light”, are solid tracks, however they’re in the lower tiers of teasing tracks the band has offered in the past, not even touching classics like “Pull Me Under”, “As I Am”, or even “These Walls”. The sound of the album is improved over recent releases, at least: John Petrucci seems to have finally ditched the chocolate guitar tone that’s plagued the last two records, and Jordan Rudess seems to be relying on some more atmospheric vibes on the keys in the vein of former keyboardist Derek Sherinian, as opposed to some of the cheesy synths he keeps pushing (though they still show up from time to time). But drummer Mike Mangini still has a fat, plastic sound to his snare, toms, and especially the bass drums, and that added to his robotic style of playing makes the percussion on this album, as with every album DT has made since 2011, sound like a high-performing drum machine, far too artificial for a reputable progressive metal band. It occasionally meshes with the other instruments just right during some of the fills and punches with some notable intensity, but it isn’t enough to justify the sound quality across the album.
I think my biggest problem with Dream Theater right now is that they keep compromising good ideas with watered down, predictable and tired melodies, not to mention cliched lyrics. “Fall into the Light” starts out with one of the strongest Petrucci riffs I’ve heard in a while, but it quickly devolves into plodding verses and a chorus with a weak hook. The same song enters a gorgeous instrumental break after the second chorus, but for me the spell is always broken whenever it returns to the chorus afterward. Similarly the nine-minute “At Wit’s End” opens with some slick diminished scale riffing and keeps up the intensity with a galloping rhythm for the next few minutes, but by the halfway point the song slips into another tepid ballad and I’m left checking my watch (or I guess my phone, it’s 2019). While “Out of Reach” is the only true ballad on the album, the band can’t seem to maintain a certain level of badassery throughout any of their harder-edged songs, and the overly sentimental bridges and choruses (since the band remains fixated on the verse-chorus-bridge song structure) ring all the more hollow with each repetition of the formula. I can appreciate longer songs like “At Wit’s End” and “Pale Blue Dot” exhibiting a wider range of ideas and emotions, that’s kind of the point, but I miss out on any catharsis if the emotions expressed all come across the same way.

Distance Over Time once again falls short of the mark of a prime DT album, but it isn’t all bad, in fact there’s a good bit of it I liked. Objectively I think A Dramatic Turn of Events remains the post-Portnoy album I prefer over the others, but it certainly sounds like Dream Theater challenged themselves on this record, and the result is a fairly diverse experience, and a much less exhausting one than I’ve had from the band in some time. Were it less sappy and predictable, I’d be much more excited about it, but the most important thing the band needed to prove here was that they hadn’t lost their minds, and I think they’ve done that much.