IMAGES AND WORDS - LIVE IN TOKYO

There is a thing about Dream Theater concert DVD's that really bother me, and this one seems to be the one where it all started: mixing the concert with interviews and videos of them fooling around and promotional videos of their songs. That really distracts from the attention of the concert experience and won't allow me to enjoy it. Sure, those extra features would be great if added as bonus material. Or at least as Pink Floyd did with Live at Pompeii, they may have added an extra feature including only the live concert as an uninterrupted whole.

Some other problems won't let me enjoy this DVD as much as I would like. To begin with, they chose almost none of the songs that I like from the already released albums up to that point. Only Wait for Sleep, which is too short to rescue this video; Pull me Under, which is much more enjoyable on the original album (there are some really horrible patented LaBrie screaming added to this version); and Ytse Jam, which has some added extra-long drum solo that makes it really hard to fully enjoy it. From the videos, once again the only I really like is Pull me Under, but this is an edited version, and I really miss the deleted minutes. The rest of the songs are OK, but nothing too memorable for me, and some awful LaBrie screams keep on ruining them.

Sure enough there are some interesting points on this video, mainly to see Dream Theater play, whatever songs they are playing, is very entertaining, and being such an early DT performance is also cool, specially because it includes Kevin Moore in the Line-Up.

I would give this video 3 stars if it were only for the concert (even though they didn't play most of my favorite songs, none are so bad as to not making it enjoyable), however, I take one more star because of the interviews and promotional song videos mixed with the concert.