After a couple verse-chorus segments, Petrucci leads the way into an interesting and complex lead section, making good use of all four instruments, even some creative tom fills from Mangini. It’s surprising a short little three-syllable word like “ Alien” can make for a decent chorus, but it does.
When the lead guitar concludes, James LaBrie steps up to a microphone, dripping wet with effects, to deliver verses about interstellar travel and human efforts at extraterrestrial exploration.
Before even a minute has passed, the song goes from a barrage of complexity, to a grunting chugging angry metal-face kind of thing, back into some complex grooves, back to chugging, and back to grooves, before the clouds part, and the ray of sunshine known as John Petrucci’s neck pickup glowingly delivers a gentle, medium-gain solo of soulful vibrato. The first track is called “ The Alien,” and it is pretty otherworldly. Most of those people are members of Dream Theater. Some people write face-melting progressive metal in time signatures which require math degrees. You get about one second of Mangini drum roll before being attacked by the entire band at high tempo. Upon hitting “play,” the listener is immediately ambushed by an instrumental fury that’s actually a little bit like “ Hypersonic,” the opening track of LTE3. One was to write a giant epic, and the other was to write a major key,” John Petrucci explained to Robert Cavuoto at Sonic Perspectives. There were a couple of things that I wanted to do on this album that was a bit of a different. The first few songs we wrote for this album were very long, progressive, and heavy they were ‘The Alien’ and ‘Sleeping Giant.’ After we had done that, we switched gears as we got it out of our system let’s do something different. We are not trying to write certain types of songs like we did with ‘ Distance Over Time,’ where we were consciously trying to write Dream Theater music in a more concise package. “ When we got together for this album, there were no rules let’s just see what happens. However, the band made some conscious efforts to “ Breaking All Illusions,” and shaking off some of the conventions and preconceptions. More or less similar to” Octavarium,” without hearing anything. There are a handful of tracks ranging from six to ten minutes, followed by a twenty-minute juggernaut beast. Standing in the record store, looking at the back of the jacket, glancing over the track times, one may think this is the usual garden-variety DT offering (with the obvious exception of works like Scenes and Astonishing). Thankfully, in this day and age, technology allows comprehensive video and chat collaboration for the writing process, along with file sharing, although for the final high-fidelity digital recordings, LaBrie was able to make it to the US to do his sessions onsite in the studio, so the tracks did not need to get laid down in Canada. The only member unable to participate in the studio personally was vocalist James LaBrie, barred from international travel during the endemic by our benevolent dictators. Rudess and Petrucci are rejoined by the soft-spoken six-string bass slinger John Myung, and gameshow-genie champion Mike Mangini enclosed within his titanic drum kit. The band lineup thankfully remains intact since the previous record and tour. With any luck, their powers of premonition will carry forward to their new and optimistically titled album, “ A View From the Top of the World.” Although keyboard wizard (sometimes literally) Jordan Rudess and guitar virtuoso supreme John Petrucci had just finished Liquid Tension Experiment 3 with Messieurs Levin and Portnoy, they retained sufficient creative juices to keep the momentum and return to the very same studio and deliver a fresh Dream Theater record. It is a different world in which we awaken, and the gentlemen of Dream Theater are not insulated from it. Although the album was released in 2019, we have certainly experienced some “ Distance Over Time” in these two brief yet interminable years. The title of Dream Theater’s most recent studio album has proven premonitory.
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