Lyrically, Blackheart Revolution follows the same thematic playbook as its predecessors in the Genitorturers discography - horny gothic dominatrix fantasies are the order of the day - but musically it feels like the band spent the time since their last major burst of recording activity giving their sound a refresh, adding a muscular alternative metal undercurrent to things and dialling back on the more well-worn industrial metal clichés whilst still remaining broadly in the same ballpark. Is it a defiant rallying cry for alternative sexuality, or just an attempt by the Genitorturers to move with the times? Listener, it's both, and whilst it's no top-tier classic, it's a neat new direction for the group, and if it is to be their swansong, it's a solid way to go out.

This EP - released under several configurations - is largely a delivery mechanism for Lecher Bitch, which had appeared on the Vampire: the Masquerade Bloodlines soundtrack and so ended up being one of the Genitorturers' more widely-known tracks, but the live cuts here are pretty decent too. The group's particular style of horny industrial metal was, as a genre, beginning to lose steam once the 1990s were done, and this ends up being the last hurrah for the group's earlier sound, their approached being somewhat updated for the subsequent Blackheart Revolution. Worth it if you need Lecher Bitch in your life, otherwise you'll probably want to check out their first couple of albums before getting around to this.

Talk about your dramatic turns of events! With Mike Portnoy returning to Dream Theater out of the blue and Mike Mangini bowing out with good grace (so far as we can tell), expectations where high for this album. It's not that the Mangini era of the band is outright bad, so much as it's rather mixed; A Dramatic Turn of Events was pretty solid, but their self-titled album was less celebrated and The Astonishing met with a serious backlash.

Notably, with the latter they abandoned their usual full-band collaborative approach to songwriting, Petrucci and Rudess handling all the music themselves and Petrucci writing the lyrics solo, further contributing to the sense that the well-honed Dream Theater creative engine wasn't quite working as it should. Then again, Distance Over Time and A View From the Top of the World seemed to find the band back on an upward swing - the question was, would the return of Portnoy reinvigorate the band or disrupt them just as their creative process was recovering from the weird experiment of The Astonishing?

Before you even get to the music here, you're confronted with cover art that seems designed specifically to build high expectations. Sure, it's a spookier, gloomier image than we've become used to from Dream Theater (though not so much that it feels completely uncharacteristic), but what really jumps out about it is that it's a big riff on the Images and Words cover; we've got an older girl stood next to her bed, and whilst the surreal features of the Images and Words cover suggested the colourful imagery of dream, here we're stepping more into the realm of nightmare.

So not only is this Portnoy's big comeback, but it's being set up as this big thematic sequel to the band's breakthrough album - if Images and Words was Songs of Innocence, this is Songs of Experience. Lyrically and thematically, this continues right into the album itself; "Parasomnia" is a term for a particular category of sleep disorders, and the songs here are all about sleep paralysis, nightmares, and other things of that nature. It's not a narrative concept album so far as I can tell, but it's definitely a thematic one, with the band taking us all on a thrilling trip through the realm of nightmare.

If the album's cover and lyrics showcase thematic unity, the credits suggest the return of the fivefold creative partnership responsible for the success of this lineup's successful run from Metropolis Part II to Black Clouds & Silver Linings. To the extent that Mangini got credits for songwriting, he did because Dream Theater typically share the credit for all of their musical compositions and generally only go for individual credits when it comes to song lyrics - which Mangini notably contributed much less of than Portnoy had. Portnoy's back on the lyrics again here, and one can only assume that he's settled back into making contributions to the musical compositions too, since all five men in this lineup had become well-used to workshopping ideas with each other.

All of this show of unity and co-operation would come to nothing if the music didn't hold together of course, and I'm happy to report that this is a decidedly strong Dream Theater album. It's not on the level of albums I'd personally put on the absolute tippy-top tier of the band's output - Images & Words, Metropolis Part II, and Octavarium - but it's a decidedly solid effort which refreshes their customary style with the combination of a well-defined and tightly targeted atmosphere and mood on the one hand, and on the other an injection of a few more gleeful retro-prog influences into the mix than we've heard on recent albums from the group.

One suspects Portnoy may have had a hand in that, given that he'd spent much of his time away from the group working with Neal Morse (both on Morse's own projects as bandleader and in more collaborative contexts like Transatlantics), and anyone who's that keen to keep contributing to Neal's prog projects probably has a healthy appetite for old-school prog stuff, but at the same time this isn't so much of a divergence from A View From the Top of the World as to represent an outright repudiation of that album, or the Mangini era as a whole.

Really, my biggest criticism of it is the needless Images and Words nod on the front cover - I think it's silly of the band to implicitly invite such comparisons when this isn't really a throwback to that era. The group aren't rewinding the clock here or pretending the last few albums didn't happen - they aren't hopping back to a pre-Mangini period, it's more like Mangini tagging out and Portnoy tagging in back in, the group carrying the lessons learned forward. It remains to be seen whether this new era of the band will have the staying power of the last time this particular lineup was all together - like I said, the Mangini era did start strong before it got into the weeds a little - but whilst this isn't a revolution in the band's sound, it's still a promising start.

Among the most symphonically-inclined of Sigh's output, Hangman's Hymn sees them returning to a more immediately recognisably black metal style, but with sonic enhancements learned from preceding avant-garde efforts. Comparable to works by the likes of Deathspell Omega, it finds Sigh demonstrating an ability to keep up with newer acts throwing in an honest to goodness choir on top of all that. After this they'd go back on a less traditional route, but the mere fact that this is closer to more readily identified metal subgenres shouldn't lull you into a false sense of security - having shown they can break the rules whenever they please, Sigh return to a more traditional format to show just how completely they master such structures.

Another Rush live set which offers plenty of material but which doesn't quite hit the mark, in part because of the annoying decision to have the crowd comparatively high in the mix, something which has affected their live releases from at least as far back as Rush In Rio. It's because these live releases of theirs tend to have accompanied DVDs, and are usually just the audio from the DVD transferred to CD with some touch-ups here and there - the problem is that if you're listening to a CD rather than watching a DVD, it's probably because you want to hear the music and can take or leave the live crowd ambience.