When Dream Theater broke the radio barrier in 1992 with "Pull Me Under" - in the last days of rock radio's importance - they offered a whole generation of musicians a way to hear the tired dinosaur of progressive rock. Using not just the classic prog repertoire of Yes and Rush, but adding Metallica's own debt to prog, heard most clearly on song's like ". . . And Justice For All", and the band's early tendency toward extending thematic and melodic material, DT managed to open up all sorts of possibilities for musicians who tired of the limitations of the either/or of classic prog rules and the weight of heavy metal.
Of course, as is always the case, really good bands inspire imitators. Some early metal-prog bands were a pretty direct ripoff of Dream Theater's approach, and one can hear it pretty clearly in Symphony X, for example (although lyrically, at least, Symphony X has charted a different course, sticking with a kind of "sword-and-sorcery" material, with highlights such as their attempt to put Homer's "The Odyssey" in a 20-minute piece of music, and their last release, a concept album based on John Milton's Paradise Lost). Another band that, in many ways, was pretty much a direct descendant of DT was York, PA's Shadow Gallery. Even the name, for crying out loud, was kind of a rip off.
I tried hard to like them. I guess what they wanted their music to sound like, and what I thought it should sound like differed enough so that I never quite got to the point where I could sit and listen with my critical ear quiet. All the same they have moments, to be sure. One of their best, from the CD Legacy, is this pretty little love song, "Colors". My one complaint is the addition of a slide guitar during the bridge, but that's an arrangement decision that I might have made differently, and doesn't really rob the piece of its basic prettiness (not the same as beauty).
