DREAM THEATER — Score: 20th Anniversary World Tour (review)

DREAM THEATER — Score: 20th Anniversary World Tour album cover Live album · 2006 · Progressive Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
4.5/5 ·
Warthur
One three-CD live album is a tall order, though a great achievement if you can pull it off. Putting out two is a bigger challenge, though if you've got a weighty enough back catalogue you can pull it off. Three? Now you're pushing it.

Dream Theater do, however, bring something extra to the table on Score to help it stand out. Live Scenes From New York, of course, had the benefit of being built around the Scenes From a Memory concept album; Live From Budokan didn't have a uniting theme and so I felt was a shade weaker, though the strength of the material and quality of the performances carried it. Here, they're performing in conjunction with the almighty Octavarium Orchestra, who kick in on Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence at the start of disc 2 and add an extra symphonic kick to the material from then on out.

It also helps that since Budokan the band had put out the rather excellent Octavarium, which provides a good chunk of material here (nearly an hour's worth, in fact). In addition, the band don't go out of their way to fill every disc to the brim - in fact, this is a shade over two and a half hours, which makes it shorter than Live Scenes or Budokan while still being a fairly epic workout. Finally, as the title implies the concert was recorded on the band's 20th anniversary tour, so they go out of their way to pull out some deep cuts from the early days, including a live rendition of Another Won - a track which had previously languished in the Majesty demo archives. (Another rarity here is Raise the Knife - an out-take from the Falling Into Infinity sessions, here to represent that stage of the band's evolution rather than the more familiar Falling Into Infinity tracks.)

Disc 1 sets the tone with the band playing by themselves prior to introducing the orchestra, with a thunderous, booming sound which fits the material nicely, whether you are talking about some of the classic 1980s prog metal-with-light-thrash-influence of the oldest tracks or the Muse-esque touches incorporated into the Octavarium sound, whilst the remaining discs use the orchestra to excellent effect. On the whole, it still feels like a bit of a marathon, and a bit too conscious of an attempt to repeat the magic of Live Scenes From New York, to earn a full five stars; I don't think you can catch lightning in a bottle twice like that, at least not consciously. That said, it comes very close.
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