Band:	Dream Theater
Album:	A Dramatic Turn Of Events
Style:	Progressive metal
Release date:	September 2011

01. On The Backs Of Angels
02. Build Me Up, Break Me Down
03. Lost Not Forgotten
04. This Is The Life
05. Bridges In The Sky
06. Outcry
07. Far From Heaven
08. Breaking All Illusions
09. Beneath The Surface

It seems that something like that must have happened eventually. Mike Portnoy is gone, and A Dramatic Turn of Events is the first occasion for the metal community to find out how Dream Theater fares without their co-founder and co-leader. Let me tell you straight away that it sucks. It sucks much more than I feared it would having heard the first song off the album, whose name I won't even bother to mention. Why would I want to waste time typing names of crappy songs?

I will save a lot of time this way at least. Not having to type seven names of songs saves a lot of typing time, which I can otherwise spend picking my nose and admiring the yield that came form my private excavation. It'll be also more interesting than the dubious pleasure I was privy to while I was giving the album my mandatory 10 listens. I'm a coffee guy, so caffeine always manages to keep me awake. If it hadn't been for this legal drug, I'd never have finished listening to this turd of an album.

During the ordeal of listening to A Dramatic Turn of Events I pricked up my ears only twice. "Lost Not Forgotten" is half-decent, and its chorus has some bite in it, making the song at least memorable. "Breaking All Illusions" is the only trace of Dream Theater's former glory - adventurous, intriguing, surprising, with a great, well-composed, labyrinthine guitar solo. The only really outstanding song, the only pearl among swine.

The rest of the songs are a gray mass containing craploads of forced, uninspired instrumental wankery, multiple showoff passages, incredibly drawn out fragments, boring singing and flat, lifeless choruses. Sometimes the songs are sickeningly sweet and reek of badly disguised desire for radio exposure, sometimes they are overly complicated, but put together using unmatched parts, resulting in a bigger mess than my 3-year-old niece would make if I left her in the kitchen for 2 hours. All the inspiration that Dream Theater had this time around went into 2 songs. And what the hell is wrong with Jordan Rudess? He crammed his damn keyboard passages into every nook and cranny he could find in every song, and when there was no room to cram, he put the goddamn thing on top. The omnipresence of his instrument is extremely annoying and makes the album even worse. I know he is a virtuoso, but must he prove it five times per minute?

Come back Mike, please.