I have a lot of weird stuff lying around.
Case in point: a couple of months back I was listening to the Dream Theater discography straight through, and I ranked the albums according to my preference. Then shuffled the file off into my massive, unsorted Documents folder.
1. Awake: In form and in function, the best of what Dream Theater could offer — in 1994 or in any other spaceless time.
2. Images & Words: A close second place, but the saxophone on “Another Day” pulls it down.
3. Octavarium: The first — but not the last — sign of either free-thinking or musical dementia on this list. A kinder, gentler Dream Theater, focused mainly (it seems) on composition and flow over Big Instrumentation.
4. Falling into Infinity: See what I mean? For Portnoy, this is a ghastly sell-out. For a lot of people, this is a really ghastly sell-out. For me, this is the last time Dream Theater seems to take any real, serious chances as a band unit. Maybe because they were trying to keep some vestige of their identity in the midst of a ghastly sell-out. Either way, you end up with a band fusing Prince and Queensrÿche on several songs, and doing it well.
5. Train of Thought: A pretty solid forty-five minute album drowning in its seventy minute length.
6. A Change of Seasons: An excellent title track, with a bunch of well-played but basically disposable live covers on the back half.
7. Scenes from a Memory: In which Portnoy’s admitted overcompensation for Falling into Infinity comes into play. Some very fine songs. Two of the worst ballads in their catalog — there’s nothing about FII’s “Anna Lee” that “The Spirit Carries On” doesn’t manage to do just as bad, and with the addition of a bullshit gospel choir, with twice as much fatuousness to go around.
8. When Dream and Day Unite: A very different band, in many ways. One part’s Rush. The other part’s Journey. Some pretty decent tracks — “Status Seeker” is an early classic, and “The Ytse Jam” is the definitive band instrumental to this day. Overall, the enthusiasm outpaces the songs.
9. Black Clouds and Silver Linings: The band has never needed an outside pair of ears to tell them when to quit more than they did right here. There are good ideas. “The Shattered Fortress” is likely even the best of the decade-long AA series, in large part because with its call-backs and allusions to all the previous songs, it feels like one of the most tightly-composed songs they’ve released in a decade. There are also multiple songs with significant Portnoy vocal contributions (including “Fortress”).
10. Systematic Chaos: “The Dark Eternal Night” is down there with the Cult’s “Love Removal Machine” for raw lyrical inanity — a consistent problem across the whole record, actually — and sandwiching a catastrophically stupid Muse pastiche between a Floyd pastiche and whatever the hell they were trying to do with “The Ministry of Lost Souls” doesn’t help. Perhaps sequencing is partially to blame for this, but still.
11. Six Degrees: “The Glass Prison” has about three good minutes in thirteen. None of them are consecutive. Everything else is just sad, whether full of inappropriately buoyant instrumentation (the “epic” title track, ostensibly about the travails of mental illness, sounds more like the accompaniment to a theme-park attraction about fireworks) or really unbearable attempts at lyrical or musical relevancy.
Perhaps some day I’ll do this for other full-discography artists in my music library. As a good way of informing people where this crazy bastard you’re reading right now is coming from. Who knows?
Filed under: metal , dream theater, fruitless exercise in navel-gazing, list, metal, music
The problem with Queensrÿche’s American Soldier: every segment showcasing some soldier’s first-hand observations about his military experiences dwarfs, in weight as well as depth, anything the band has to say about the same subjects. For purposes of illustration, let’s take the lead-off single, “If I were King.” The opening is a soldier’s harrowing account of his best friend catching an enemy bullet, bleeding out, and dying for want of a Medivac which doesn’t arrive. The song that follows is soggy power-balladeering, full of power chords of ersatz uplift and soaring vocal melodies that desperately wish to crash down upon them. That’s right: they began with a sadly common military tragedy and reduced it to a side-one ballad from the Q2k era. I’m not sure if that’s deliberate juxtaposition which just fails, or some kind of accidental poor taste, but it’s a fine microcosm of where (and how) the album dashes itself to pieces against its own good intentions. 
Five years on, and I’m still at a loss to explain the Tea Party’s intentions with this album. When you consider that some members greeted the album’s release by talking up plans for the next album in interviews, and that the band splintered the following year, I think we have to consider the possibility that the Tea Party were at a loss to explain their intentions with this album, too. 
