"Director: Mike Portnoy"

• Dream Theater - Live At Budokan | DVD | (29/11/2004) from £12.72   |  Saving you £7.27 (36.40%)   |  RRP £19.99

  A treasure-trove for Dream Theater fans, Live at Budokan presents an entire three-hour performance at Tokyo's famed Budokan arena on April 26, 2004, along with a bonus disc rich in supplementary material. Disc 1 finds the metallic progressive-rock quintet at its awe-inspiring best, plowing through its catalogue of dramatic epics and jack-hammer instrumentals, including five of the seven songs from 2003's Train of Thought. Disc 2 features an extended drum solo from percussionist extraordinaire Mike Portnoy; gear tours from guitarist John Petrucci and keyboardist Jordan Rudess (fascinating for lay people and downright revelatory for musicians); and a half-hour documentary on DT's 2004 stint in Japan punctuated by tantalizing snippets of band rehearsals. The shooting and editing for the concert are a music lover's dream, with lengthy shots that linger on the performances of individual band members. Disc 2 takes this even further with a multi-angle sequence of the 12-minute "Instrumedley". Production values are extremely high: it's a widescreen presentation shot on high-def video and nicely mixed for multichannel Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound (with a thinner, collapsed version of the same for Dolby 2.0). --Michael Mikesell

• Dream Theater - Metropolis 2000 - Scenes From New York | DVD | (16/04/2001) from £14.98   |  Saving you £0.01 (0.10%)   |  RRP £14.99

  Amid the lo-fi wasteland of the 1990s, Dream Theater were an unashamedly unhip throwback to the glory days of progressive rock; and in their 1999 album Scenes from a Memory they even dared to exhume that once-extinct species, the concept album. In 2000 the band took Scenes on the road, and the resulting concert footage is a testament both to their musical creativity and the fanatical loyalty of their audiences. Filmed on a sweltering August evening in New York, this was the last time the band played the album right through, using an on-stage narrator and even bringing on a Gospel choir for the grand finale. But the heat of the night is nothing to that generated by the blistering performances from a group of unrepentant musos who like nothing better than to play in complex time signatures and thrash out lengthy riffs at dizzying speed. Those not already converted will doubtless be puzzled by the sight of five hairy blokes earnestly expounding a quasi-operatic story of dying and "learning to live", while drummer/director Mike Portnoy’s decision to intercut film snippets of the album's story with the concert footage seems redundant. But fans of this band, and anyone who yearn for the classic days of Rush, Genesis and Yes, will have nothing to complain about here: don’t believe the music press, prog-rock is alive and well. On the DVD: here’s a disc that’s going to make this band's audience very happy indeed. Aside from the main concert itself there are five additional tracks--and this being Dream Theater, they are all pretty substantial, climaxing with the epic "A Change of Seasons". Then there’s a fun 25-minute behind-the-scenes documentary with crew and fans waxing enthusiastic about the band, and even more additional concert footage. The whole band gather to provide a concert commentary, which ordinarily might seem an odd thing to do, but this is prog-rock after all. A picture gallery of tour photos rounds out the extras. Sound is unfussy Dolby stereo.--Mark Walker