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Mike was kind to this in his review, and I thought: what the hell? It's been a long time since I checked out what Dream Theater are up to. I mean, I don't think I have listened to them since Octavarium, and that was twenty fucking years ago. So I was curious to see what they were going to do.

Not a lot, as it turns out. Oh sure, they are doing a lot of stuff—this is just as packed with riffs and leads and time changes and showy playing as you would expect. But there's just no charm to this songwriting, no singable hooks, no memorable melodies. They do the Dream Theater things of starting with a main riff and then mutating it over and over throughout the song, but here the lead riff is always dull, so it consigns you to like 11 minutes of hearing them do variations on a lick they should have junked before they started. There are several prog monoliths on this album, and they are all just grueling to sit through, as there is nothing interesting or engaging about any of it.

This is just a dragging, unexciting waste of my time, and no matter how I try to listen to this and get into it, I end up unable to pay attention to it, or stomach it when I do. It all reaches a kind of nadir with the twenty-minute "The Shadow Man Incident," which is an absolutely ridiculous excuse for a prog epic. It leans in on main riffs that sound exactly like every other bad riff on this album, and then it spends so long doing nothing you start to wonder if time has any meaning anymore. And the lyrics are bad. Like, embarrassingly bad.

Once, like 30 years ago, I would have called this band the best prog band alive, and Images & Words is still a landmark in the genre, but Parasomnia is not that. It is a tremendously boring slog of an album.