Dream Theater

World Tourbulence DVD (Ytsejam Records)

I know I start every Dream Theater review off with this sentence (as indeed so do many other journos!) but it’s quite true when I ask simply what can I say about the Prog Metal giants that has not been said many times before? Heralded as pretty much the inventors of the current Progressive Metal genre, and 20 years into a career that sees no signs whatsoever of this New York 5-piece even attempting to slow down, they continue to sit at the fore-front of the movement. No slouches resting on laurels and doing an album every 2 years, Dream Theater are as hard working as a Polish immigrant trying to convince a UK official that they genuinely don’t speak English until the word ‘benefit’ is raised. What seems like a constant whirlwind of albums, side projects and of course huge world tours that go on and on ... we, the fans have always got a DT product that can be added to our collection. However. as if that is not enough. workaholic and overall DT obsessive drummer Mike Portnoy has created yet another outlet (a sort of record company exclusive to the band) to put out even more releases (albeit not official ones... but a sort of quality bootleg output. Gets my vote!!). One such release is the DVD called World Tourbulence and seeing as though this tour was never actually filmed for an official CD or DVD, then this caught my attention and also a hole in my DT DVD collection, chronologically speaking that is. To say this DVD is value for money and a worthwhile investment to me is almost an understatement. Spread out over 2 discs, the first disc is the entire concert filmed in Bucharest, Romania on the 7th April 2002 in support of the 6 Degrees of Inner Turbulence World Tour. Okay, so it might not quite come up to the editing or filming standards of Live at Budokan or even Score, but for a ‘supposed’ bootleg this is excellent and is good enough for Romanian TV which is what the footage essentially is. To hear the opener of ‘Glass Prison’ really made me remember what a cool album that was, and the set list (I won’t ruin it for you) is quite an interesting a varied one. Disc 2 then is even better, and if you’re anything like me and love watching all those behind the scenes style documentaries, then I hope you’ve got a rainy afternoon to kill because this thing goes on and on (and that’s a compliment). We have some bonus concert footage filmed in Mexico City from the month before the Romanian show, again, of which there are some gems on the set list, and we then have a very long fly on the wall Bulgarian TV programme charting the arrival of DT and the fans’ response to them coming. Okay, so if you’re quite picky then I guess this perhaps could go on a bit, and it was not actually made with the band’s knowledge or permission, yet is still good fun. We then have another programme which was obviously filmed by a fan or a crew member going backstage at a gig in Germany and it follows a similar pattern of the Live at Budokan extras as it basically sees Portnoy, Petrucci and Rudess going through their rig and set-up before the show. And that ladies and gentlemen is pretty much it. Like I said, I think you’d have to be quite fussy not to get anything out of this because to me, this is a real treat and a great DVD to go with the ever growing collection of DT DVD’s. Long may they continue.

—Nick Hinton