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Members of the Dream Theater Fanclub receive each year four fabulous
magazines and a special Fanclub CD. The magazines are on high
quality glossy paper (A4 format) and full of pictures, concert and
CD reviews. For example, the last magazine was a calendar for 2004
with all the birthdays of the musicians and the dates of the gigs
filled in. A real beauty to decorate you bedroom wall. The yearly
Fanclub CD is also something special and a very collectable item.
(See the high prizes that are bid on EBay for older copies). This
year, the Fanclub CD (number 8 already) is a live registration of
their performance on Graspop 2002 on July 6th in Dessel.
(Belgium). And it was quite a performance.
This is certainly one of the better gigs of Dream Theater, if you
love their heavier stuff. Playing the Graspop festival among all the
other heavy bands, they played one of their heaviest sets so far,
and it really worked for the audience. (I wasn’t there myself, so I
can only say what I hear and what I’ve read about it.) Almost every
track is heavy, just take a look at the set list, and the only
ballad they played was “Peruvian Skies”. A beautiful ballad but if
you know that track, you are aware that after two thirds of the song
it turns heavy too.
The sound is very good, except on the first track. On festivals, you
don’t get the chance to have a proper sound check, so it has to be
done during the first track. “The Glass Prison”, the heavy opener of
the Six Degrees album, isn’t the best song to find the best sound,
so it’s only during the second track that the sound gets better. For
the rest of the album, the sound is almost perfect. And James LaBrie
had one of his better gigs. His voice is clear and never out of
tune. Only Mike Portnoy’s voice is too loud, but he only sings a few
words from time to time. The rest of the band is breaking speed
records as usual and especially the timing of their joint
performance is incredible. As always, after a Dream Theater gig, I
feel the urge to count their fingers, hands and feet, to see if the
numbers fit a normal human being. They played “Master Of Puppets”
(Metallica) in the middle of “Pull Me Under”, which was very much
appreciated by the crowd.
If you want this album, you’ll have to join the fan club. The prize
is only 22 euro for a year, if you live in Europe (20 euro in
Holland) and you get quite a lot for this.
http://www.dreamtheater.net/tod/
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