“There’s a rejuvenated feel to this reunion album”: Dream Theater’s dream team return with a sharper-edged heaviness to the sound on Parasomnia

The return to Dream Theater of drummer Mike Portnoy after a 15-year absence has been acclaimed by some fans as akin to the Second Coming.

Although his stand-in Mike Mangini, never really departed from the template that had already been laid down, there’s a rejuvenated feel to this reunion album of the ‘dream team’, which is themed around the impact of sleep disruption from sleepwalking to nightmares.

There’s a sharper-edged heaviness to the sound, clearly evident on Night Terror, which follows the ominous instrumental introduction, with an onslaught of maddening riffs and thunderous bass, and singer James LaBrie is in fine form.

A similar barrage opens A Broken Man, which describes the battle traumas that leave soldiers with nightmares and insomnia, and is heightened by their traumatised voices. In contrast, Midnight Messiah is more intricate and multi-layered, while the 20-minute heavy, proggy The Shadow Man Incident is an epic finale.

Hugh Fielder has been writing about music for 50 years. Actually 61 if you include the essay he wrote about the Rolling Stones in exchange for taking time off school to see them at the Ipswich Gaumont in 1964. He was news editor of Sounds magazine from 1975 to 1992 and editor of Tower Records Top magazine from 1992 to 2001. Since then he has been freelance. He has interviewed the great, the good and the not so good and written books about some of them. His favourite possession is a piece of columnar basalt he brought back from Iceland.