SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE

Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence has been and forever shall remain a totally uninteresting album in my book. After the wild success of Scenes From a Memory before it, the band decided to take the bombastic nature of their playing to an even greater extent by making a double album. Prepare to test your patience by listening to almost two hours of virtuosic guitar playing and absurd keyboard solos.

The first disc is what they have dubbed a more "experimental" set of songs. You can expect to hear a variety of styles here, much akin to their later album, Octavarium. The only song that I still find myself coming back to on this entire album is "The Glass Prison", which is widely regarded as one of Dream Theater's heaviest songs. Even so, I still manage to find my patience tested trying to listen through the entire (almost) 14 minutes of the song. A close second on the first disc is "Misunderstood", which has some mildly interesting experimentation during the latter half of the track. Aside from that, there's nothing particularly remarkable about the first disc.

When it comes to the whole "Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence" suite that makes up the second disc of this album, I feel as though the whole thing was a wasted effort, filled to the brim with Jordan Rudess pretending to be a whole orchestra with his keyboard. It sounds incredibly fake, not to mention cheesy. I guess if you're into MIDI orchestra sounds this is the perfect suite for you, but for me it's lame enough to bring down the whole album. Would it have been that hard to hire some people to actually play some string instruments for the album?