Metropolis II: Scenes from a Memory

I think it’s safe to say at this point that when Dream Theater came out, they established themselves as the leader of the pack of progressive metal bands who had exploded out of the scene in the early ’90s. The band’s 1992 album Images and Words solidified their style and popularity. It fused Fates Warning’s soaring vocals and melodic yet mean power metal–influenced riffs with Rush’s time signature–defying drum work, cinematic, lightning fast keyboarding and 20-minute long suites.

(Images & Words(1992) contained Dream Theaters only radio hit, Pull Me Under)

Despite this, it only took until their fourth album for the band to vomit all over themselves with the commercial interest–driven and dismal Falling into Infinity(1996). After Falling, Dream Theater’s young career was at stake, and the band knew that the follow-up would have to be bloody brilliant in order for the band to stay together.

(Genisis-Uhhh, I mean... Dream Theater. circa 1996)

The result was a progressive metal masterpiece and the last undeniable highlight of the band’s career: Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory.This album is a sequel to the song Metropolis on the aforementioned Images and Words.

A 20-minute-long sequel was originally written for Falling into Infinity, but in favour of a more commercial direction, all the songs from those sessions were scrapped. Hence, on this release the band decided to revive the Metropolis story and instead make a whole album around it.

The concept revolves around a man named Nicholas, who has been plagued by disturbing dreams and intense déjà vu from another life. He sees a hypnotherapist to help him understand these dreams, and eventually finds out he is being used as a puppet by the ghost of a woman named Victoria, to expose the truth of her murder in 1928.

(The album did so well that the band hired actors to play out the story during live shows as the band played.)

The album comes in from a lot of musical angles, bouncing between Nicholas in the real world and Victoria in the dream world. It uses the heavy, frantic, and somewhat schizophrenically paced progressive metal riffs to display the anxiety, confusion, and obsession on Nicholas’s side, and the horror, pain, and dread on Victoria’s. These aspects are the highlight of the album. Not only are these some of Dream Theater’s best riffs, but songs like “Dance of Eternity,” “Home,” and “Fatal Tragedy” highlight how excellent every single one of the members in Dream Theater is at their respective instruments.

(The instrumental proficency of the album wowed many, but it was John Petrucci's amazing guitar licks that got him invited to the G3 Guitar God Supergroup shortly after the release of Metropolis II. From Left: Joe Satarani, Steve Vai, John Petrucci)

All these aspects are then glued together by clean, melodic keyboard-based ballads that, although they create a contrast and connect the record together, aren’t really notable and tend to drag on. There are four pure ballads in total, and a few of them drop in out of nowhere in the middle of a head-spinning progressive metal track. Two tracks in a row of such ballads isn’t a great progression, either. I’m listening to the musical equivalent of a gripping supernatural crime drama, guys, not riding an elevator to the 45th floor of a hotel.

("Oh god, if I hear one more Piano ballad...")

Joking aside, this is the record that kept Dream Theater from losing hope and staying relevant into the’00s. Sadly, the band would never reach the same critical heights again. The follow-up, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, was a double album that shouldn’t have been a double album. It marked the start of the band’s lack of experimentation and the cementation of the same formula that would be used over and over again to this day. Still, this is the record that kept the band together and showed that along with Images and Words, Awake, and the “Change of Seasons” EP, Dream Theater is a force of progressive metal to be reckoned with. 8/10