Album Rating: 4.0

TOOODAY IS GONNA BE THE DAAAY

Album Rating: 5.0

come on boys, oasis and green day under fucking Scenes from Memory?

Thats just wrong

Album Rating: 4.5

Today is gonna be the day that I walk a lonely road

Album Rating: 4.0

DREAM ON DREAM ON AAAAHHHHH



(Yes, the full mash up includes Aerosmith. Back to DT talk now)

Album Rating: 5.0

Victoria is peeeel.

I finally feeeeel.

A piece of girl in my meeeaaat.

Finally listening to this after years of all my prog-geek friends telling me how great it is.

About 50 minutes in rn aaaaaaand... it's aight.

Gotta say though, as much as I poo-poo these guys for all their masturbatory technicality-for-its-own-sake, anybody who isn't at least a little impressed by "Dance of Eternity" is either lying or an idiot.

Album Rating: 4.0

There's no doubting their chops

Gotta say though, as much as I poo-poo these guys for all their masturbatory technicality-for-its-own-sake, anybody who isn't at least a little impressed by "Dance of Eternity" is either lying or an idiot.
agreed

Trying to understand what they were going for with this whole story thing is giving me a headache. A lot of concept albums end up a bit thematically muddled, but this shit is downright incomprehensible.

i don't remember it being that complicated

Album Rating: 4.5

It's really not

I said "thematically muddled", not "narratively muddled"

It's not like it's all that hard to parse the actual events of the story or anything. I get it- "Guy finds out through hypnosis that in a past life he was a woman who was involved in an affair and was killed, and tries to solve the case. He finds out it was not, in fact, the man who she was cheating on, but the man who she was having an affair with, then TWIST, the hypnotist kills the guy because I guess he's like the reincarnation of the killer, or something.".

I just don't get what they were going for at all. Entirely leaving aside the kind of gross framing of the woman's murder as a way for Protagonist Jones to work through his vague, non-specific angst, I just don't really think the message of "be brave in the face of death & trust that your spirit will survive your mortal body" fits all that well for a story about solving the grisly murder of a woman who was cheating on her boyfriend? Maybe that's just me but I don't think crime noire really lends itself to uplifting, feel-good messages.

Album Rating: 4.0

It's not an uplifting story. The theme is of the cyclical nature of violence and the inevitability of fate.

Album Rating: 4.0

Still their best album by a grand mile.

Hmm. My takeaway was that (since it's the clearest philosophical statement of the whole album and it's positioned roughly where the narrative climax would logically go within the album's runtime) "The Spirit Carries On" is the centerpiece of the album, and the rest of the album does a pretty dodgy job of setting those ideas up.

I'm genuinely curious what lead you to conclude the story is about cyclic violence and fate, because honestly that didn't even cross my mind.

Album Rating: 4.0

It's like the ending of American Beauty where Spacey's character achieves resolution and catharsis but dies senselessly because of events that he has no control over. Similarly, the spirit carries on is told in the first person and the character THINKS he has the answers but fate has other plans for him.

Wow yeah, that's pretty much the opposite of uplifting. I have a hard time believing they were aiming for something that bleak tbh, but if they were... Idk, it still doesn't really work for me, partially because I didn't get the sense that everything was building to this, like "Oh shit, he was doomed from the start, wasn't he". It was just kind of a Shyamalan moment that came out of nowhere. I guess if you don't think the ending seems tacked-on and extraneous then it makes a lot more sense to place weight on it.

Album Rating: 4.0

It could definitely be a tacked on Shyamalan type twist, or the band might've had this idea for how, despite us having the warm fuzzies that everything is going to be okay, death is always inevitably around the corner. Iirc that was the theme of Pull Me Under too, so it's not completely out of character for DT. They don't write straightforward happy stories in their songs.

Album Rating: 5.0

^This. Sitar's interpretation is pretty much the same I came up with and I think it must be pretty close to the concept the band had in mind

I mean, Metropolis Part 1 is also talking about eternal pain, cycles and shit. It makes sense, even though the lyrics for Metropolis Part 1 were not intended to make sense