CLEANING OUT THE CLOSET

This truly is cleaning out the swampy closet of B-sides and demos for the overall quite mediocre album Falling Into Infinity and a few from before that. This album is essentially Portnoy taking all the songs the band did not see fit for an album (most are understandable) it compiling it into another release on his well known DT bootleg label YSTEjam Records. The majority of the disk is the forcibly popularly accessible tracks the producers of FII made the band write. For the most part, these tracks, such as Don't Look Past Me and others, are overall bad. They have cheesy melodies, lyrics, musicianship, and an overall pop/alt rock kind of feel. It's not the kind of Dream Theater that the average fan knows. To balance the cruddy pop music, however, Portnoy throws in two versions of the sublime "Lie" single B-Side, as well as the 11 minute "Raise the Knife," one of the few good FII demos. Overall, the compilation is really only for die hard fans who really need every piece of music the band has written (which is me).

The obvious poppyness of many of the tracks can get sort of irritating after numerous listens. I, a huge fan of the band, have to say that I am massively grateful the band never put these on an official studio album, because they would probably ruin my love for the band. They have that cheesy quality of pop rock radio music, not the type of stuff I want to be listening to in any frequency. Although some of the tracks, like To Live Forever, Raise the Knife, and partly Eve, have that nice Dream Theater quality, overall the CD is just not good. In the end, I can understand why Dream Theater would want to release their unreleased material, but I would have rather they kept some of the worse tracks for their private collections. 2- stars.

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