The new Dream Theater album “Black Clouds and Silver Linings” was released recently, and this evening I managed to get to listen to it.

I was quite surprised at how soon this album was released after Systematic Chaos. Perhaps Systematic Chaos was badly received or something (it certainly isn’t one of my favourite albums by them). Black Clouds and Silver Linings certainly isn’t Scenes from a Memory, but you can really hear a difference in the quality, tone and brutality of their sound now that they are signed by RoadRunner. As with all Dream Theater albums, you have to listen to it start to finish, and typically, there are a lot of > 10 minute tracks. It’s very interesting, though, how the sound of a band change when they are signed by a different record lable. Now that they are with RoadRunner, there are detectable elements of Fear Factory and Killswitch Engage, amongst many of the other fantastic bands that RoadRunner have signed.

Interestingly the last part of Portnoy’s 12-step suite is on this album, so I’m quite interested to make a playlist containing each of the songs back from Six Degrees up until now, and listen to them in order. There’s an interesting article on Wikipedia about the 12-step suite, which you can find here.