Dream Theater's Black Clouds & Silver Linings

I feel Sacrificed Sons was the only 'really bad' track on Octavarium. Granted, nobody seems to have admitted that they like "The Answer Lies Within" or "I Walk Beside You" and there's really no inspiration in "Never Enough", but the rest of the album seems great from my point of view. Just chop the album in half, call it Quadrivarium and you have some of DT's best work yet.

StyLaZyn wrote: Snow Dog wrote: darksideof wrote: In my opinion their last great was Octavarium. All the tracks were great. In my opinion it was a very poor album. I thought that Systematic Chaos was much improved. Octavarium had some excellent Progressive moments, IMO. It was SC that was poor, unless you are talking from a metal standpoint.

Personally I thought Octavarium had no excellent moments of any description, with one decent song in Scarificed Sons and the rest being rubbish. I agree with Ian in that SC was a much better album, regardless of how prog it was.

KingCrimson250 wrote: Is it just me or are they suffering from "Pink Floyd Syndrome?" It just seems to me that with every album, Mike and John take more and more creative control, and the quality ends up suffering. I think what made IAW and Awake so great was they had solid contributions from all four members. And James was there too.

Is it just me or are they suffering from "Pink Floyd Syndrome?" It just seems to me that with every album, Mike and John take more and more creative control, and the quality ends up suffering. I think what made IAW and Awake so great was they had solid contributions from all four members. And James was there too.

I mean, Learning to Live was, IIRC, a Myung song. Sure John and Mike had a lot of say on those albums, but Myung and Kevin balanced them out a bit. Myung's been pretty stifled and Ruddess has never really had much of a creative presence in the band


Edited by KingCrimson250 - June 03 2009 at 11:02

Admin note - post implying illegal downloading/stealing of copyrighted material deleted.

Take note.

Pre ordered the 3CD edition from Amazon

good thing you stole it instead of waiting for it to come out! You could have had a real problem there, wasting a couple $12 on it.

Stooge wrote: I was surprised to see Larks' Tongues on the covers list.  I'll be curious to hear their take on it, but my honest initial reaction to this was laughter.

Hahahaha no surprise to me. I discovered Dream Theater before I discovered KC, so the first time I heard the opening bit to Larks Tongues 2 I remember thinking "Wow, this sounds like the inspiration for about half of Dream Theater's riffs."


So what I'm getting out of this thread, and out of everything I've heard so far about the album, is download Count of Tuscany and forget the rest?

In my opinion their last great was Octavarium. All the tracks were great.

ProgRockFanatic wrote: Well I was disappointed again with it.  The last good DT CD in my opinion is "Awake".  The last great one is "Images and Words".  It has been pretty much down hill ever since.