SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE

This is one fat album. Many people say that Train Of Thought is Dream Theater's heaviest release. For me, it's Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence, which is one of the band's greatest efforts to date. It only features six tracks but they cover a runtime of an hour and a half, this is because it features a 42-Minute suite, which is the title track. After an album like Metropolis Pt. II it was going to be hard for the band to impress their fans, but Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence manages things that its predecessor couldn't.

Those things are extreme consistency and more focused works. Unlike Metropolis which had a good amount of one and two minute tracks, the shortest track in this album is 6:40, and the majority of the songs are +10 minutes long. However, these songs are not stretched out on purpose, they're as long as they deserve to be, with many small sections composing them that still manage a cohesive work with surprises.

For example, The Glass Prison. It feels like a 13-minute song because of its reprises of previous parts within itself while also managing to surprise the listener with what everyone likes to call "Technical Wanking". Blind Faith features, in my opinion, Jordan Rudess' best solos, and one of the best solo duels (in this case, guitar vs keyboard) I've ever heard! The Great Debate has some of the band's best drum work to date, and the Tool influence is very strong in this one too.

The closing epic is a 42-Minute track, with eight sections. The sound of the sections are different, going from soft ballads (Goodnight Kiss, Solitary Shell, Losing Time), to classic-DT-sounding tracks (About To Crash, Overture, Grand Finale) and hard-hitting works (War Inside My Head, The Test That Stumped Them All, About To Crash (reprise)). It works amazingly when listened from beginning to end, and it's one of my favorite Dream Theater Suites.

Although I can't say this is my favorite Dream Theater album, it's without a doubt one of the best, not only of their discography, but of progressive metal too. Five Stars for me.

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