September 11, 2005

Dream Theater: 2005 Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence

Every time Dream Theater releases a new album it usually takes between three and five listens before I'm really able to wrap my mind around the music and decide if I like it or not. Of course, I always end up loving it and can't imagine them making any new albums that don't sound like this. Then after a couple years they release another album that sounds very different from the last and the whole process starts over again.

Now that I've finally fallen in love with the newest release, Octavarium, and have been listening to it non-stop for well over a week I thought I'd post my personal ranking of Dream Theater's studio albums. I’ll post my thoughts on one album per day, starting with the lowest ranked and moving upward. Here we go!

2. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence

This album would deserve to be this high on the list based exclusively on value. At two discs and over an hour and a half of music, it’s a lot of stuff to listen to. Add in that the double album is almost uniformly excellent and it locks in hard to the number two spot. Disc One has what has now become part of a three album (with more to come) epic in “The Glass Prison”, great rocking songs with “Blind Faith” and “Misunderstood”, one of the two best political Dream Theater songs with “The Great Debate”, which deals with stem cell research, and “Misunderstood”, a great dark moody song. Disc Two is the forty minute long “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence”, which, though not as tight as Scenes From A Memory as a concept, is just filled with movement after movement of great tunes.

An interesting bit of controversy among some fans centers around the song "Solitary Shell", which shares a lot in common, musically, with Peter Gabriel's "Salisbury Hill". Another Dream Theater song, "Home" from the Scenes From a Memory album, has some riffs very similar to "46 & Two" (if that's spelled wrong, feel free to correct me, but I really don't care much) by Tool. The argument is always that the songs are some kind of rip off, but I think these people are simply not taking the time to contemplate the possibility that there is a purpose for emulating the songs. "Solitary Shell", for instance, plays on the themes of "Solisbury Hill" and puts them to use in a much darker song. I don't want to go on too long here, as I've done in several forums over the years, so I'll just leave it at the statement that those who disagree with me are both wrong and stupid, so ha!

"They call him desk duty, Robocop. Younger dudes call him Freddy Krugs from the way he walk on the block."

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