The Dream Theater on that record had Charlie Dominici on vocals and Kevin Moore on keyboards, along with what for a long time was their very stable core (and founding trio) of John Myung on bass, John Petrucci on guitar, and Mike Portnoy on drums. Dominici was replaced by James LaBrie - and then Derek Sherinian replaced Kevin Moore before being replaced with Jordan Rudess in 1999. I had lost track of them = finding their music to be technical, but not appealing emotionally, or so I thought. I rediscovered them again in the early 2000s, when all of their line-up changes appeared to be over and they were a stable band. I found their music online and liked it enough that I ended up revisiting all their releases - and purchasing all of them - and I have followed them since. I thought they had their ups and downs in the early 2000s, but Black Clouds and Silver Linings from 2009 really found them back in excellent shape.
Then they dropped the bombshell that Mike Portnoy was leaving. Portnoy is a spectacular drummer, but more importantly for Dream Theater fans was the fact that he always had been the voice of the band to the public and kept insanely high levels of fan interaction. His struggles with alcoholism were well documented, and his personality is larger than life, and when he wanted to take a break, it may appear that the rest of the band jumped at the chance to replace him instead. I don't know the story, and I am not enough of a fanboy to really care all that much, but I liked him, and he is out of the band.
After Portnoy's departure, they found a great replacement in Mike Mangini, but to me, the music has not been as good. To me, it is falling back into the space between the two great albums Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence and Black Clouds and Silver Linings, which really wasn't all that interesting. To me, the music of Dream Theater is at its best when they mix the technical with the melodic - if they overemphasize one over the other, the results are meh. Their melodies often lean towards clichés, and their technical music sounds technical for the sake of being technical, which I really don't care much for at all. Their latest album, The Astonishing, is a concept album with a plot that seems like a carbon copy of Rush's 2112 as music has been outlawed, with character names that are so transparently unoriginal that they become completely laughable (how about evil emperor Nafarius and his daughter princess Faythe, who has a pure soul that once heard real music and who falls in love with a musician named Gabriel). Of course, Faythe gets killed by a mistake, and of course Gabriel brings her back to life with song... I can barely bear to listen to it at all, which I hate to admit...
Today's song, Home, is the sixth scene from the album I still think is their masterpiece: Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From A Memory. It had the line-up that I think is their best, and it tells a story, albeit a slightly hard to track one, and is a continuation from a song off their second album, Images and Words, which also was a very solid album (come to think of it, they appear to work in spurts, with a couple of great albums followed by a lull of slightly boring ones). The song takes a long time to build, with Arabic tinged sounds and scales (I have to admit that I have a great liking to the Arabic scales when used right). There is a lot going on in this song, and it is long, but it is very worth it listening through it in its entirety. When they reached the melodic lines in the chorus, it doesn't matter how many times I have heard it before - the goosebumps show up!
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