Musicman_1990

When I listened to this double CD for the first time, I was a bit puzzled because it didn’t retrace, as I had hoped, the steps of Scene From A Memory. So, I parked it in my CD holder until, having nothing else to listen to, I popped the first CD of this masterpiece into the stereo...
The Glass Prison is simply fantastic, and Mr. Petrucci's seven-string guitar showcases spectacular riffs and unbeatable sound. Worthy of deep listening are also "The Great Debate" and "Disappear," which I consider inferior to Space Dye Vest from Awake.
The sonic orgasm begins with the listening of the second CD, where Dream Theater truly excel. The entire 46-minute song is beautiful, flawless, with Rudess taking over and leading the band in a mix of melody, technique, harmony, and originality. After AWAKE, it's the best album written by DT. Period. Long live PROGRESSIVE!!!!!!!!!

I can define this album with one word: TECHNICAL. According to the DT, this work was specially created for the Japanese market, where metal, various technicalities, and 16-year-old girls are perfectly intertwined. I am convinced that if you read a review from a Japanese person (if you can!), they will surely speak well of it; but we Europeans, who now have a refined ear, can say: "WE DON'T CARE ABOUT TECHNIQUE! WE WANT MELODY!" And indeed, I judge this work to be a LITTLE too technical, as half of this CD is made up of long thirty-second unisons that really break your balls... anyway, I consider this CD good because certain songs like IN THE NAME OF GOD or ENDLESS SACRIFICE are fantastic and evoke emotions with their epics, while some like THIS DYING SOUL only show how much a hand can endure playing those things without catching fire. HONOR THY FATHER and AS I AM are definitely good METAL songs. VACANT is very pretty and MELODIC, but I don't think it's on the same level as the melancholic SPACE DYE VEST, and STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS is an endless instrumental lasting 11 minutes with 200,000 notes, which, as beautiful as it is, could have lasted half as long. Perhaps I judged this work too harshly, but deep down I liked it because listening to good old metal never hurts, especially when it's written by someone with taste like DREAM THEATER.