A few months ago, Dream Theater played to 100,000 fans at Rock in Rio. On Saturday night in Tel Aviv they played to fewer than a tenth of that number. But what the fans lacked in quantity they more than made up for in quality. People were wearing t-shirts running the gamut of Dream Theater’s previous four trips to Israel.
When vocalist James LaBrie addressed the crowd, it felt almost like a family reunion. “It is so nice to be back,” he said. “How long has it been? Four years? But now we’re back together. It is so nice to be back together.”
The unspoken message throughout the evening was that we’re all back together, and Dream Theater has a new album, despite COVID-19 (or perhaps because of the pandemic). A year ago, it would have been unthinkable to have thousands of people crammed together into Hangar 11 for a concert. And without the pandemic, Dream Theater would have continued touring their previous album, and would not have written and recorded “A View from the Top of the World.”
The concert kicked off with the band’s Emmy-winning song, “The Alien.” The song as a 17/8 time signature, and guitarist John Petrucci said in his award acceptance speech that it was impossible to dance to, but that did not deter a few young men standing behind me from stomping around (and crashing into quite a few others around them). An almost 10-minute song is an ambitious way to start a show, but that is what this crowd was here for.
Each song was accompanied by an epic video presentation, shown on the giant screen behind the band. This gave the impression that they were playing on alien landscapes, or above a hot air balloon, or in the depths of the sea.
The band launched immediately into “Six O’Clock” accompanied to a backdrop of clocks — most, but not all, going clockwise. Then came the live debut of “Sleeping Giant” off the new album, followed by “Bridges in the Sky.”
They played “Caught in a Web for the first time since 2015, accompanied by images of crawling spiders and webs (not ideal for anyone in the audience suffering from arachnophobia).
They performed four of the seven songs off the new album, including “Answering the Call,” followed by “Solitary Shell,” which they haven’t played live since 2010. Digging even deeper into their back catalog, they brought out two songs that haven’t been on stage since 2006, “About to Crash” and “Losing Time/Grand Finale.”
Finally, they got to a song that everyone knew and could sing along with — “Pull Me Under.” The lyrics seemed very poignant for a band and audience recovering from the trauma of lockdowns:
This world is spinning around me
This world is spinning without me and
Every day sends future to past
Every breath leaves me one less to my last
…
Pull me under
Pull me under
Pull me under, I’m not afraid
All that I feel is honor and spite
All I can do is to set it right
As LaBrie said, “Music is magic because it brings everyone together.”
Finally, they ended the set with the epic, 20-minute “A View From the Top of the World” — the final song on the new album.
After leaving the stage, they then came back for a 20-minute encore with “The Count of Tuscany.”
Almost two and a half hours of show, 12 songs, great show.