Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 8.5/10
There are great swathes of people, billions across the world, who will look at a task or a project and then be put off by the time it takes to complete it. Time, they say, is too short to build a bridge across a raging river, and it will interfere with all I do, meaning that they just don’t recognise that by building the bridge, they don’t have to remain, glued to all that they ever knew, and will know.
If Time is relative, then what does that make distance, and they are joined, when the ties that bind them are sharp and cuts through the skin; it is the reminder that insisting that something cannot be done because it takes three years, but then in the same sentence it is cooing over a photograph in someone’s social media account and being surprised that it was only a couple of years ago…Distance Over Time, what is put off today cannot be recaptured, and as Dr. Seuss remarked, “How did it get so late so soon?”
In the best possible tradition marked out by Progressive Rock’s Dream Theater, the multitude of questions wash over the listener as frequently as the pulse of deep introspective thought, time is lost in reverie but never in clouded paralysis, Time is a sanctuary, but it is also a means of persecution and damnation to those who are not willing to submit to anything less than the fullness of its wrath and joy.
It is in the sanctuary of released feelings that Distance Over Time is held up as an immunity from the banal and the snake bite of the unsafe harbour, a place where the clock may indeed strike 12 but it will be heard ringing out across the land of the uncommon key signature change and more expansive poetic reason.
It is to Time we invest, the bridge across the raging river must be erected but so few want to be involved in its actual construction, idly sitting by and letting a decade get behind them, and yet they still insist that a week in the future is a long time away. It is to Dream Theater that Time and distance are favourably sought as guides, and in tracks such as Untethered Angel, Fall Into The Light, Barstool Warrior and Pale Blue Dot, those guides are able to detach themselves from the emotional foray and instead lead on the listener to a place in which the blue print to the future is in their hands; whether you choose the road ahead is up to them, but as with all great insistence’s it cannot be ignored.
An album that is a treat for the mind, as well as the soul, Distance Over Time cannot be measured by a simple equation, instead it must be lived and experienced.
Ian D. Hall