A CHANGE OF SEASONS

The first ''album'' by Dream Theater featuring great keyboard player Derek Sherinian. It's his first appearance with the band, and still Dream Theater chose to lower his keys right from the start in the mix, just like in Falling Into Infinity, luckily it's not as buried as Myung's bass. Despite of that, you'll definitely be able to listen to his unique playing with the jazzy presence being a great bonus, however his writing skills will be omitted here since most of the epic was written with Kevin Moore.

As far as this ''album'' goes, being a long EP(contradicting, eh?), it's compromised by only one original song, the epic, the title track which is what makes this interesting and worthy of buying, while the rest being decent live covers from classic rock bands in general. So, I won't talk about the covers since you have the originals to really know what they're like, and will focus on the only original track.

So, what is the epic like? For me it's the ''Supper's Ready of Prog Metal'', not because it's similar to it or anything, you've got Octavarium for that, what I mean by this is that A Change of Seasons is definitely one outstanding, flawless, piece of Prog music, in which ''defines'' Prog Metal, but mostly Dream Theater, while Supper's Ready can be simply said the same for Symphonic and for Prog in general.

However, don't get me wrong, Supper's Ready is un-touchable for me, A Change of Seasons can't get anywhere near it in means of composition, however for the Prog Metal genre it can. All in all it's a very well structured composition, full of details in which each of them are as memorable as the epic itself. It presents some very nice acoustic bridges very unlike Dream Theater, as well as soft and emotional bits which would later reappear in the album Falling Into Infinity.

Definitely an essential song if you're a Dream Theater fan and a Prog Metal fan. If you liked Images & Words, I'm sure you'll love this epic. As for the rating: 4 stars due to the epic solely, I won't take off stars due to the non-essential live material, it's just isn't fair, similar case is Tarkus, with it's forgettable side 2.

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