[Riff] On Mangini-Era Dream Theater

By Hamza Siddiqi

Alternate titles: The Lord of the Mikes: The Fellowship of the Prog, The Two Drummers, and The Return of the King.

Like a lot of people, I was extremely pleased to hear of Pike Mortnoy’s return to Thream Deater. Porntoy’s drumming and influence on the band resulted in music that tugged on my heartstrings and added wrinkles to my brain as a budding, bright-eyed young metalhead, and his loss from the band was one I felt acutely. How many feel about Joey Jordinson, I feel about Portnoy, despite the fact that my drumming, really, sounds nothing like his. There’s something special about Portnoy’s drumming that hits juuuust right – a certain style, a certain swagger. The off-beat splashes, the rolling fills, the snare-snare-bass-bass fills – Mike’s Portnoy-isms tickle my brain like few other drummers can.

You can only mock things that have a strong personality.

Mike Mach II, codename:Mangini, felt like a replacement from A Dramatic Turn of Events all the way up to A View From the Top of the World, much the same way that Rob Trujillo probably always will, in spite of the fact that he’s literally Metallica’s longest-serving bassist. They say time heals all wounds, but clearly this isn’t true; despite being an excellent drummer, Mangini-era Dream Theater never delivered an album that I enjoyed as much as Black Clouds and Silver Linings, much less Awake, Images and Words, or Train of Thought. It’s hard to say how much of this is me and how much of it is them; I don’t know if I believe in objectivity in music, so in a sense I guess it's *all* me – but my interest in Dream Theater waning during the Mangini-era was a response to something. I mean, I was still a budding, bright-eyed young metalhead in 2011 when A Dramatic Turn of Events came out, and despite my heartbreak I did really did try to love it – but I never did. I didn’t mind it, but it didn’t capture my imagination nearly as hard as my favourite Dream Theater albums, and every album since 2010  has been six degrees of inner “meh.”

I’m having the opposite experience now with the release of Parasomnia, an album that truly feels like it was made for me. In a sense, it is – there’s some truly shameless nostalgia-bait on the album with its callbacks to classic DT up to the 2000s, something I truly love the album for. Cheesy? Maybe, but DT has always been about the cheese, and I’m vibing with it harder than any Dream Theater album since Black Clouds. Who can say why? The only real change to the equation has been Portnoy – I don’t know what happened in the background, because it’s not like Dream Theater has been lacking in inspirado since Portnoy’s departure; say what you will about The Astonishing, there’s ambition there, and despite how little on an impression it left on me, I’m totally willing to admit that A View From the Top of the World is… neat. The problem is that – despite how cool I can recognise it is on an intellectual level, my heart just isn’t feeling it.

If I’m iffy about his era of Dream Theater, I don’t think it’s Mangini’s fault. I haven’t looked into the metalsphere discourse surrounding Parasomnia, so I’m only really getting the surface-level SEO access journo-y posts that the (Meta) alghorithm serves up. You know the type, your run-of-the-mill, hyper positive music press that you never really need to read past the headline, because the interesting shit is *really* in the comments, where all it takes is one keyboard Christgau with a negative opinion to spawn minutes of moderately entertaining scroll-fodder. The real journalism is the braindead arguments about which drummer is better, either chops and technique-wise, or as songwriters, or simply for Dream Theater as a unit; angry fans who see the return of Portnoy as a step backwards (which I guess it literally, like objectively, is); and your cool-headed (read: boring) Portnoy defenders – which I guess it’s easy to be when things have turned out the way you wanted them to – who just want everyone to get along (I fall pretty firmly in this camp, by the way). But the most interesting thing I’ve learned from this, though, is that Mangini’s got his fans, and passionate ones too. There are actually Dream Theater fans who prefer him to Portnoy. In a way, I think it’s actually kinda nice.

I’d always thought of Mangini’ drumming in DT as lacking the strong personality that Portnoy had. Re-listening to A View from the Top of the World, knowing that Portnoy is back, is a bit weird, because my perspective on that has shifted somewhat, because I don’t think that that assessment was *quite* accurate anymore. There’s more of a modern metal feel to the rhythms here, less of the Peart worship that Mike brings to the table. I still feel like it’s missing a certain extra spiciness that Portnoy’s style had – it’s just a bit *too* tasteful, you know? The feel isn’t the same, it’s too brainy with not enough caveman energy. Mike would do weird shit that other Mike would be too good to touch, and it’s that extra weird shit that takes Dream Theater over the top for me. Not to mention, it feels like Mangini always tried to keep the band’s sound together by taking a fair bit from Mike’s style; if he’s come on board and everything had changed, I might have been more poised to accept it. Think of Richard Christy on The Sound of Perseverance – completely different from Hoglan on Symbolic.

Is this making any sense? Fuck it, pseudo-intellectualising done, anyway.

Nearly done, anyway. To end off with, a thought experiment: if Jason Newsted could return to Metallica, would we really want him to? I don’t know if there are many people who would ever say they prefer Trujillo but I doubt how many people would want Newsted to return, even if he did want to. And to be a bit facetious for just a minute – if Cliff could be resurrected, no strings attached, I think loads of fans actually would be 100% on board with giving Rob the boot and bringing the zombieman back on board. Similarly, John Frusciante returned to the Red Hot Chili Peppers a couple of years ago, seamlessly climbing back onto the throne that Josh Klinghofffer had been keeping warm for years. I don’t think anyone was disappointed by this. True, RHCP’s mass appeal is much wider than Dream Theaters, so the idiocy of crowds needs to be taken into considerationl; but more importantly, in situations like these the new guy is almost always gonna be standing in the old guy’s shadow – especially when the old guy was such a force of musical personality. Jason dealt with a lot bitterness during his tenure in Metallica, bearing the brunt of an absolutely brutal situation, Cliff hovering over him like an otherworldly spectre, a spectre that left with him after 15 years after the absolute shitshow that was Some Kind of Monster. Conversely, nobody really seems to give a shit about Josh Klinghoffer, which is a damn shame because his band Dot Hacker is actually pretty great – but Froosh is so revered that you can’t even watch a Dot Hacker video on Youtube without the Frusciante v. Klinghoffer disussion cropping up somewhere in the comments.

For all my big preference for Portnoy, I’m really glad Mangini has escaped this fate. His profile rose with Dream Theater, but he had a long career before them and he’ll continue to have one after. He has a place among the prog greats, especially among those names who continue to pop up periodically – Billy Sheehan, Derek Sherinian. You know the type.