METROPOLIS 2000: SCENES FROM NEW YORK

Last week I was in one of my favorite record shops and noticed that there was a large selection of mid-priced DVD's. Due to the cascades of euphoric reviews about Dream Theater I decided to buy this DVD. This in order to give them a final chance because until the moment of buying this DVD I couldn't listen to DT from more than 15 minutes! Here is my final analysis from this highly acclaimed prog metal legend on Prog Archives.

Most of their music is 'adrenalin pushing' prog metal, very bombastic and virtuosic featuring excellent musicianship, exciting interplay and great soli on guitar and keyboards. On "Overture" I'm delighted about the spectacular, pitchbend-driven synthesizer soli, "The dance of eternity" delivers a stunning sitar-sound on keyboards, along splendid wah-wah metal guitar and the classical orchestrations on "Finally free" are wonderful. But listening and watching this DVD I still have problems with the overwhelming bombastic, very technically based prog metal sound from DT. I can imagine that lots of progheads love this music but I miss emotion and I miss elaborate compositional skills, after 15 to 30 minutes I still can't bear this 'technical tornado'. And I start to ponder why DT is so extensively reviewed: are they pleasant mainstream, do so many progheads want to be impressed by technical skills or is prog metal simply the future? For me DT is a good and entertaining band but I prefer more emotion and more variety.