Although the members of the legendary progressive metal band Dream Theater have built a career and legions of fans by putting out album after album of complex music, they are also known for inserting coded references to past works and ambiguous meanings, creating songs that are just as much cryptographer’s handbook as music. Indeed, their most recent release, Octavarium (2005) is not only an album in itself, but a retrospective of referenced lyrics and themes woven into the fabric of the music.

With this most recent tour, the idea of a multi-layered retrospective left the studio and went on the road: for the final show of Dream Theater’s 20th Anniversary Tour on April 1, 2006 at New York’s famed Radio City Music Hall, the band took the idea of a retrospective album and extended it into a show. 6,000 fans and a film crew watched as a themed, carefully chosen selection of video and songs sent the audience back to 1985 – the year Dream Theater-precursor Majesty released their first and only demo – and led back through each album to the title track of Octavarium. With this piece, a song that explores both the influence of cycles and circles on life and nature and sums up the band’s career as a whole, the band capped off a concert that served as a milestone to the first 20 years of Dream Theater.

Song Selection

More than any other Dream Theater show I’ve seen in the past, the theme of the night was anthems: whether it was a fist-pumping cry to the world like "War Inside my Head" or "Sacrificed Sons" or a heartstring-tugging ballad like "The Spirit Carries On" or "Vacant," it most likely ended up on the set list. The choice of anthems was deliberate, I believe; they have a common point by being same type of song, but still show how the band members have changed throughout their careers, album by album.

The inclusion of so many anthems had a huge effect on the emotions of the crowd, too: hands waving in time, lighters flaring in the dark, singing along with the choruses, the audience took all of the band’s energy and amplified it back to the stage full-force. The effect reached its peak at the end of the first set with a moving performance of "The Spirit Carries On" that reached the level of emotional power displayed during the performance captured on the DVD Live Scenes from a Memory in 1999.

The Octavarium Orchestra

When the curtain came up on the second set to the familiar strains of "Overture" from the title track of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (2002), it introduced the second of the night’s big surprises: a 20 person orchestra, replacing the instruments originally handled by keyboardist Jordan Rudess’s synthesizers. Accompanying the band throughout the second set and subtlety underscoring the growing sound palette used by Dream Theater on their past three albums, the inclusion of the Octavarium Orchestra was a masterful move: it added new dimensions to existing songs, gave a very special touch to the evening (after all, how often is Dream Theater going to bring an orchestra on tour with them) and show the new ways Dream Theater puts the "progressive" in progressive metal. The result was a set as wonderfully grandiose as the anthems the band was playing.

Octavarium

Besides being an excellent way to end a concert that attempted to compress 20 years into three hours, "Octavarium" is one heck of a song to see live. Beginning with Jordan Ruddess’s incredible extended improvisation on his original solo and ending thirty minutes later with such an outpouring of emotion as to leave singer James LaBrie in tears, the band pulled out all the stops for this one epic. As a visual aid, the video for "Octavarium" was fascinating: it not only helped illustrate a number of the song’s references, but ended with an extended animated sequence by Mika Tyyskä of a giant spider chasing LaBrie through a maze to the center, where the band waited, playing along with the song. The spider chased LaBrie across the surface of the band’s instruments before all five members of Dream Theater mutated into an enormous octopus and drove the spider away.

Perhaps, with this animation, the band was trying to show symbolically that, united in their strongest lineup, they’ve defeated the various demons that haunted their past, summed up the efforts of Dream Theater’s musical history and are ready to move on to many more years of rocking out. For me, it was great end to a great concert.