LIVE AT BUDOKAN

Triple live albums are a lot to digest - in vinyl days when bands like Yes or ELP put them out, you'd be looking at some 2 hours of music, and in the CD era bands with a mind to could push this to closer to 3 hours (or even longer).

Live At Budokan is the second triple live release from Dream Theater, following up the excellent Live Scenes In New York. To their credit, they don't overstuff it to the extent they could have, with the total running time coming in at under 3 hours. There's also a lot of solid material on here, much of which hadn't been on a major Dream Theater live release before (ie, setting aside fan club releases and official bootlegs and things of that nature): you get a good helping of Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, plus most of Train of Thought, plus good selections from the rest (including the remarkable Instrumedley of various Dream Theater and Liquid Tension Experiment instrumental snippets and a take on Beyond This Life which works in a Frank Zappa cover/tribute).

The main reason I don't think it quite measures up to Live Scenes From New York is that that had the play-through of the entire Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory concept album to really give that a solid reason for being as long as it was - main album, plus some shorter songs not on that album, plus a clutch of epics added up to three hours which went by in a breeze. Here, the length seems a tad excessive.

The reason I don't think it's more than half a star below Live Scenes From New York is that the material here is damn strong, and Dream Theater are at the height of their powers here. If you are interested in exploring Dream Theater's many live releases, I'd still give Live Scenes From New York the top prize, but I'd say this should be close after it on your checklist.