UNIVERSAL MIGRATOR, PART 1: THE DREAM SEQUENCER

With the Universal Migrator albums, Arjen Lucassen made a classic mistake - having produced enough songs to fill a double album, he decided to actually make a double album as opposed to trimming the fat out to produce a really top-notch single album. In this case, I can kind of see why he did it - Ayreon has already catered to both a prog audience and a metal audience, so it must have made some sort of sense to make one album (this one) err towards prog and the other tend towards metal, but on the whole I think he'd have been better off putting out one carefully pared-down album to cater to both audiences.

In this album's case, the space rock-tinged, almost Floydian side of the band is paramount, and whilst there's good songs - the doomy My House On Mars is particularly good - there's also a little too much filler for the album's good.