Formative Albums 7 - Scenes from a Memory by Dream Theater

[davidn]

I think this is number seven? Here's something that I found in the shared files on the network at university in 2005 or so, put up there by someone I knew as Steveo, who used to stay in the same residence as me and who is now the Earl of Cumbria or something. He was into stuff that was on the pretentious side, and alongside Stratovarius and Pink Floyd he had a fairly large collection of songs by a band I'd heard the name of called Dream Theater. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence was the first song that I heard from them, but Scenes from a Memory is the one that has stayed in my mind the longest.

Dream Theater are possibly one of the most recognizable names in progressive rock/metal, a cousin of the power metal genre I was familiar with, where music is characterized by its length and complexity. And there's no doubt that they're a group of incredibly talented musicians, but a lot of the time I feel they lean a bit outside actual music in the traditional sense and into the territory of show-off wank that happens to be in the shape of music. Scenes from a Memory does contain a certain amount of this (take for example The Dance of Eternity, a song in every time signature known to man and some from space) but it's connected so wonderfully together, with a story about solving a murder that happened 100 years ago through what Wikipedia tells me is called past-life regression therapy. Oddly, I feel I got an even better experience out of this album by downloading the songs individually as the connection allowed, before eventually buying it for myself, rather than being able to listen to the album beginning to end at first - a mountain of themes and references are woven through its 77 minutes so I could discover them gradually song by song, and it was another step in the idea of telling stories through music that I'd come to love.

The highlight for me is the wonderful ballad The Spirit Carries On, which builds gradually into a triumphant reprise of the very start of the album. As it was one of the last songs that I downloaded, it was all the more effective at tying together the story and calling back to this simple guitar strumming that I'd heard in the opening. It made me want to take my own attempts at music in a more story-focused direction, but I wasn't anywhere near being close to being able to pull that off at the time (and doing something of this complexity will frankly always be beyond me).

Comments

[kjorteo]

Hah. I love how your formative albums exploration posted a Dream Theater album the same day we posted a Rhapsody one. We kind of have this thing with swordianmaster where they're a huge Dream Theater fan but I find them to be a bit much for me, which is exactly how they feel about Luca Turilli, of whom we're a huge fan. Like, each of us simultaneously looks at the other like "You know, I like my thing but yours is a little out there for me."

(It's because they're out there in different ways. Dream Theater has a simple-enough sounding track like "Panic Attack" but musically it's almost unlistenable because they're too artsy and clever for their own good so they blended unnatural time signatures, harsh aggressive music, and an intentionally uncanny unease into it to give you the authentic like you're really there experience of having a panic attack. Meanwhile, Luca Turill has songs like NOVA GENESIS AD SPLENDOREM ANGELI TRIUMPHANTIS where the lyrics involve four choirs and three languages and may or may not be part of some encrypted notpr0n-style ARG, but musically it's a perfectly fine and catchy power metal tune you can bop to if you ignore all that and pretend it's in Simlish.)

[kjorteo]

That said, "Solitary Shell" from Six Degrees is very pretty and also kind of feels like an Ardei callout post.