SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE

After the masterpiece that was Metropolis Part 2, Dream Theater continued their trajectory into darker, heavier music with their followup, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, which as you can immediately see from the album art, is not going to be mistaken for something happy any time soon. While I do personally prefer this sort of sound more when compared to their early, synth heavy lighter music, I do think that compositionally, this album is quite a bit weaker in many places when compared to Awake and Images and Words, mostly in terms of its formidable length combined with DT's habit of dragging out a song for a few minutes too long hindering the overall enjoyment I have of the album.

Despite my criticisms, The Glass Prison shows no signs of this in the slightest, being by far the best song on the album, and one of my favourite songs by the band, wonderfully fusing thrash metal into their sound to create an amazingly powerful, oppressive, and downright brutal song. I absolutely love the 12 step suite in general, and think that it's easily one of the band's greatest achievements, and the one that kicks all of that off is definitely a strong one, with the insane instrumental breakdown being perfectly chaotic and carrying on for the perfect amount of time, with enough variation to maintain interest. Furthermore, the rest of the song is equally as excellent, especially the desperate chorus. Past this point the album falls on its face for a bit, with Blind Faith being nothing more than a standard rock track that happens to carry on for far too long, and Misunderstood has a very similar issue, especially with the outro that feels quite pointless and repetitive, not having the hypnotic effect that many great, repetitive pieces have to them, making it instead boring. The Great Debate is my least favourite song here for quite a few reasons. The biggest one is that while I normally don't care too much about lyrics, I really don't like when bands such as Dream Theater get political, it just doesn't feel right at all and really takes me out of the music. What makes this track worse to me is that I don't even find the music itself to be particularly interesting, sure, it sounds different in ways such as James Labrie singing with a strange robotic voice in sections, along with the chorus which completely halts the groove and pace being set in favour of some really passionate screams, but on the whole, this song doesn't do much for me at all, mostly due to the extremely lackluster vocal melodies, which dominate a lot of the song, but just don't sound good at all.The album gets back on track aftre this, with Disappear, which I find to be extremely good due to its atmosphere and melancholy tone, being an all around lovely track.

The second half of the album is really what most people think of when they thik of this album, the 42 minute long title suite. I personally find it to be somewhat too long, but to have so many amazing sections in it, along with an interesting lyrical concept running through, focusing on the topic of mental illness. The suite has a far more symphonic sound to it compared to essentially anything else they've ever written, which works to varying degrees of success. On one hand, I'm personally not a fan of Overture, finding it to drag and have an overly cheesy sound to it, while Solitary Shell has a strong Yes influence to it, and while I'm not the biggest fan of Yes, this track still works quite well. I definitely find it to be the best when things are on the heavier, more frantic side, specifically War Inside My Head and The Test That Stumped Them All, both of which showcase their heavy side exceptionally well, the former focusing on slightly slower, heavier riffs (still quite fast paced), and the latter being all about insane rhythms with frenetic keyboard playing and drumming. It ends in a satisfying enough way, but overall, while certain aspects of it work, I'm still not too keen on Overture and find the reprise of About To Crash to be fairly uninteresting, although I still stand by many aspects being great.

Overall, this is an extremely uneven albums, with moments of brilliance, but also aspects of wasted potential. My bigget issue with it is undoubtedly the fact that I feel like this could have been easily made into a single disc album and have been one of the band's better efforts, but as it stands, I can't rate it highly, as there are too many moments of boredom found within, at least to me. The biggest positive I can say about this album is that I really love the direction they began to take that becomes more developed in their next album.

Best songs: The Glass Prison, Disappear, Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence

Worst songs: The Great Debate, Blind Faith

Verdict: A much heavier and darker album than previous efforts, but also a very uneven one. I'd highly recommend listening to the best songs here, as they are incredibly good for the most part, but I couldn't really recommend the middle 3 tracks on the first half.