SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE

Yeah, so this album pretty much is generic and once again fails to live up to what Dream Theater is capable of. The fundamental problem of this album is that it has no identity. Its focus is divided between two different disks each veering wildly in too many different directions. There is no sense of cohesiveness or unified . So here we go:

Disk 1:

The Glass Prison- and here we begin the Mike Portnoy project which at this point is still interesting, and remains interesting up to and including This dying soul (off of Train of Thought). After that it becomes a tedious and repetitive train wreck. This song is OK, but just that. Just OK.

Blind Faith- Best song on the album for me. Solid from beginning to end.

Misunderstood- For the most part a great song, but it goes off the rails at the very end wasting 3 minutes of time in a wannabe King Crimson esque discordant improvisation. This part is unnecessary and really brings down the rest of the song.

The Great Debate- Comes off sounding like a failed Tool song. Long winded and ultimately boring.

Disappear- Just awful. Please James, stop writing lyrics. This song is discordant and has no focus. I've listened to it maybe 3 times in my lifetime. Songs like this and Prophets of War really prove that Labrie should just show up, look pretty and sing the lines. Leave the lyric writing to Myung (who is the only one who can rival Moore's lyrics) and maybe Petrucci if he promises to stop writing such cheesy garbage about dark masters and rare vintage wine.

So that's the end of disk one, yes already. Just 5 songs and 2 of them are terrible, so in the end, disk 1 is pretty empty and one that I rarely ever listen to.

Disk 2:

Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence- What ever, seriously. Many people would label this song as Flat out lame. Well it is, kinda lame, but I consider it a guilty pleasure. Its so very strait forward and plays by the numbers never really doing anything interesting. Its just 42 minutes of generic music, and way below DT's standards. It does nothing which I would define as Dream Theater.

So overall, this album is a failure, especially following Scenes. Its just all over the place, switching wildly from one sound to another. Albums like Images and Awake had a wide variety of melodies and arrangements but at the end of the day It all sounded like it belonged on those albums. SDOIT is just an experiment, and not a very good one.