Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence by Dream Theater

I've always had a love/hate relationship with DT. With one foot firmly in metal and the other in prog, I felt DT never quite served both until I heard SDOIT. John Petrucci came up with riffs that Dimebag Daryl and James Hatfield would have envied while ridiculously shredding himself into another universe. Portnoy lives up to his reputation and demonstrates sublime tech playing, so CD (LP) 1 to me is metal bliss. CD (LP) 2 starts with the often overlooked classically trained Jordon Rudress showing his symphonic prowess before the album evolves into a true prog suite peice with many fine motifs such as beautiful acoustic playing from Petrucci. And as long as this album is, all of the songs are top notch with no filler. I've said how I feel about SDOIT, now what's your tak

Edited by SteveG - July 21 2014 at 14:28

Hnrz wrote: I also have a love/hate relationship with DT, it mainly depends on the album. I really like Metropolis Part 2, Octavarium, A change of seasons (the suite), Images and Words and A Dramatic Turn of Events, but the others don't really do it for me (from what I've heard). I'm going against the grain here (and against PA ratings), but I think Six Degrees is a fairly weak album in their discography. I think this is because often my main problem with DT's music is the lyrics, and I feel that the lyrics here are fairly weak. They seem forced and a bit too cheesy, and this prevents me from enjoying the music as much as I should. I can deal with 'The Glass Prison', 'Misunderstood' and 'Disappear' but the rest I can't seem to get into.

For me, the bane of most Prog music has always been weak lyrics, but after 40 years I've gotten used to it. It's worse now with Waters and Zappa out of the mix and Gabriel almost mute.

Edited by SteveG - July 19 2014 at 11:16

Everything that is SDoIT I love...the concepts, the idea, LP1 and LP2, the lyrics and of course the playing for me is ultimate Dream Theater. I pretty much enjoy each song, and I agree some of the musical passages are some of the best within the genre of prog.
This was the height of their creativity in my book.

I do like all of it, The Glass Prison is one of the best DT tracks and its good to hear Rudess taking a more commanding role on disc 2.

I happened to listen to this yesterday during a long drive.  It's my second favorite DT album.

For me this is a very frustrating album. Mainly because there is no album from DT that I love as a whole. They all have some songs that I really love and make this band among my very favourites, but they all also have some rather weak or annoying songs that I wish weren't included. Most of the albums actually have enough minutes of awsome music to make a whole album anyway, only shorter than they ended up doing them. Now, what makes 6 Degrees so frustrating is that CD 1 is my very favourite CD from the band, and it would certainly have made for my very favourite album from them... but this is a double album, and CD 2 has just about nothing for me, so it's half and half.