SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE

This is one of the most frustrating albums from Dream Theater for me. The thing is, even though I really love this band, and they have done some of my very favourites songs, somehow I have not been able to love any single album of theirs from start to end, they always have some songs that kind of turn me off. Now, the frustrating aspect of the album: CD1 would have been just the very album that I would have considered a Masterpiece from them, with every single song being an absolute killer (except perhaps for the closer, which I still find very good, but just doesn't reach the excellence of the rest of the CD); however, CD2, the "Six Degrees" suite, just doesn't do it for me.

About CD1, it's all perfect Prog Metal Dream Theater, mostly heavy, and I guess the best part of it, with just about no ballad, except for the closer, but even that one isn't as bad a ballad as they usually do, nor does it have those annoying "trademark" LaBrie high vocals that just don't work on their tipical ballad. "The Glass Prison" is easily among my very favourite DT songs, and the rest are just as good. This would easily have done a 5 star album.

On the other side, CD2 just doesn't live up to the first one. It just doesn't have such memorable melodies, nor riffs, and this one has got those ballad moments I was so grateful that were absent from the first disc. Actually, this CD has got very little metal indeed... though I won't deny it's got a lot of prog. I guess this would be the closer they have come to doing a prog piece of music without being prog-metal. The one song I really love on this disc is "War Inside my Head" (which happens to be the heaviest moment on the CD), but it's by far the shortest one. There are some very good moments around too, specially the instrumental second half of the song "Goodnight Kiss", which is lovely, though unfortunatley the first part just doesn't do a thing for me (I wish this solo had been part of "War Inside my Head" instead, and then that would have been a really killer song). As a final note, I just would not consider this CD to be a single 40 min + song, the different songs are pretty well identifiable for the most part. They are all undoubtedley part of the same whole, but not one single song. This CD would be 3 stars for me. So, in the end the album as a whole gets 4 stars.