SFAM vs. I&W

The best DT albums ever, my fav from them with a plus on Image

Epignosis wrote: I don't even see how this is close. Scenes from a Memory is progressive metal excellence. Images & Words....well, a few people know my ideas on that, and based on the response I got from them, I'll not repeat them here.

I'd be more than happy to mention your thought on I&W.

Scenes probably the best of the two but does not measure up to Awake which IMO is DT's best album.

Scenes From A Memory by far.

E

Roj M30 wrote: micky wrote: one is listenable... one is my favorite drink coaster..along with Space Revolver...    Sacrilege I say, sacrilege.  Micky, how can you say that about Space Revolver?   One of my favourite albums of all time .

Well, it's nicely done for what it is, but it's so completely generic and inoffensive many find it boring. As with TFK and all modern retro-symph in general.

topofsm wrote: stonebeard wrote: Images and Words has a magical atmosphere. SFAM has a few really excellent song and a bunch of carnival riff w**kery.    I have to say the same, though to a different extent.   Don't understand the love for SFAM. Seems like that's the album that contains all the stuff that people hate the most about Dream Theater. The solos are pretty uninspired compared to their other work, and there are songs like "Through Her Eyes" which add nothing to the album. The only thing it has above I&W is the concept and the flow of the album, which is pretty damn good. Act 2 is FAR FAR better than anything you'll find before that on the album.   I&W is great. I don't feel a ton of love for a few of the songs, but the album has such a great atmosphere. The only song I tend to not like is "Surrounded", but it fits the album's mood perfectly. Any solos on that album are well phrased, and even when the band is showing off like in "Metropolis", it doesn't get annoying or unusual. Just a great album overall.

Have to agree with some points here.
SFAM  love seems to be an album that is somewhat driven by the fanboy love I think *waits to get my neck cut off*
The music, the compositions and the atmosphere just don't hold up as well as Images and Words.
Some people argue SFAM is more 'mature and well thought out', but if musical maturity and well thought out music means making it sound less inspiring, have less of an exciting atmosphere and have songs that disrupt the flow of the album, then I don't like 'great musical maturity and better thought out' in this case.

I'll try to bring some objective details to my argument as well, not just objectivity.

Dance Of Eternity, I think could have been left off the album entirely, I do not see what it adds to the album at all

To quote what I wrote in another thread " Songs I skip from  SFAM: From Dance Of Eternity. It makes me think the band wrote it simply because fans accused them of not being 'progressive enough' on FII , so they wrote that song just for the sake of a complex piece, but it seems to add absolutely nothing to the flow of the album album and bores me.

It's musically disjointed and haphazardly constructed. A proper progressive metal song is supposed to have the riffs/musical ideas/motifs etc joined in a connected manner.
Dance Of Eternity is not that. It is simply a bunch of tangential ideas thrown together, which in itself is fine because that's what a lot of thrash metal and death metal bands too to great musical sucess.
But the DT fanboys start going on about how it's "OMG ITZ TEH UBER PORG METULZ'. But sorry to disappoint boys, but it's just technical metal if the composition is not progressive, which again in itself isn't a bad thing, but I think it's a poorly written and poorly executed example of tech metal that doesn't fit the album at all.
Fanboys just have to kill it don't they, urgh.
If I want good tech metal, I can find much better examples to get my tech metal fix.
To top it off, it has some genuinely boring soloing at points to boot.

One Last Time, is a track I just can't care about, and I skip straight to the next one, The Spirit Carries On.

Images and Words however, is consistent from start to end in all aspects.
John Petrucci had better guitar tone back then,which is obviously not an aspect that non guitarists would really listen, but for someone like me who plays the damn things for hours each day, better guitar tones can help bring more life to the overal sound of an album.
Fortunately the guitar tones in DT never got as bad as PoS ; P ({PoS being the band with probably ten of thousands of dollars worth of gear and still making the guitar tones sound flat, washed out and lifeless.
Pretty embarrasing on their part when I've heard guys with 300 dollar direct recording devices that kicked the crap out of their 10 000 dollar + plus rigs for guitar tone).

Images and Words was mastered less compressed. This is not an arguable opinion, but a fact (told ya I'd bring facts to the table folks).
This results in the album having more dyanmics because the album has more room to breath because the variations in the softest and loudest volumes on the album are simply greater.
SFAM is more compressed and as result, hass less dyanmic range i.e difference between softest and loudest volumes.
Unfortunately, DT did not continue to utilise the fantastic dynamic range of Images and Words for their much later releases, instead conforming to the industry standard of making their albums more headphone friendly (well, to an extent compression make it's more headphone friendly, unless you mean Death Magnetic levels of compression, which just causes your headphones to sound like mud, lmao)  by inducing compression during mastering.


There is no corny story behind it, because come on folks, you're kidding yourself if you think the accompanying story with SFAM is anything but corny, because it's not like it's literary genius or something that any kid with a half a brain in a college English class couldn't write. I bet members of PA could come up with a better story line than that.
Girl meets other guy, her current guy doesn't approve so he shoots her and the guy she was truly in love with.
That's not hard to get your head around folks is it? But the fanboys tell you it's the greatest story for a concept album ever. These must be the same people that haven't yet even heard of Dostoyevsky, yet read his stuff.
Now that, my friend's is a guy that wrote a mean story.
There is nothing wrong with a simple story, but there is when the fanboys hype it up when clearly far better fictional stories were written and gracing this this earth well before members of DT were even born.
I can think of well over 50 metal albums with more intelligent, better thought out lyrics and better concepts without necessarily being concept albums.

I don't hate SFAM.
In fact, I love some of the songs from it and I love some of the playing on it too.
But as I stated in a DT poll thread (about a month ago now), it's the fanboys that go some way to.. well, not ruining, but making this album less interesting than it actually is.
It would be okay if the fanboys could accept that story behind the concept of the album is nothing special, but fanboyism really tends to get in the way of a clear, proper objective view.
Otherwise, other fans are free to like/dislike the music on SFAM as much as they like, but the fact is, whether you enjoy the music of Images and Words or not, it was that album and NOT SFAM which was the original prog metal bench mark setting album by Dream Theater and the more innovative album of the two.





Edited by HughesJB4 - January 30 2009 at 01:40

HughesJB4 wrote: (Good lord, I have a knack for producing a fairly long post if I actually put my mind to it:P)

I went with Scenes, but I think DT have progressed even more in later years, and to my mind their achievement graph is still constantly climbing.

Roj M30 wrote: npjnpj wrote: I went with Scenes, but I think DT have progressed even more in later years, and to my mind their achievement graph is still constantly climbing.   I think we're in the minority here, but I fully agree with you.  The recent albums are great, and I prefer DT now as opposed to the mid 90s.  Systematic Chaos is fab, and I look forward to the follow-up.

I don't really love SC, but recent DT is really underrated. So I somewhat agree.

topofsm wrote: stonebeard wrote: Images and Words has a magical atmosphere. SFAM has a few really excellent song and a bunch of carnival riff w**kery.    Don't understand the love for SFAM.

Most probably because the album came after Falling Into Infinity, which kind of amplified Scenes from a Memory. Fans are craving for a better follow up release after that album, while the band is summing up all their wits to save their careers and sanity.  They released a great album, and it sounded even sweeter after the band's lowest point.