DREAM THEATER — Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (review)

DREAM THEATER — Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence album cover

Album · 2002 · Progressive Metal

4/5 · 2010-04-19
Stooge

Although I did not own this album until about 4 years ago, I was introduced to Dream Theater in 2002 on the Six Degrees tour (with Joe Satriani and King's X). I went to the show for Satriani, but left the venue with far more excitement over Dream Theater. Their show, which consisted of many of the songs off SDOIT, converted me to a Dream Theater fan. When I finally purchased this album 4 years later, the great concert memories came back.

Anyways, about the album itself: This is Dream Theater's sixth studio album (with an appropriately numbered title) and consists of two CDs. The first consists of 5 separate songs, and the second disc contains a single 42 minute song, although this song is divided among 8 different tracks. My personal favorites on disc one are The Glass Prison, Blind Faith, and Misunderstood. Each of these 3 songs are all over 9 minutes long, but they all seem to flow rather smoothly and have the feel of tracks that are 3 or 4 minutes shorter. The Glass Prison is a very heavy start to the album and has a very catchy keyboard riff played by Jordan Rudess that appears several times in the song. Both Blind Faith and Misunderstood are rather mellow songs which suit James Labrie's vocal range rather well. I like the riff by Petrucci underneath the chorus of Misunterstood as well as the various solos in the song. However, the last 2 tracks on the disc, The Great Debate and Disappear, don't seem to have the flow of the first 3 tracks nor do they keep my attention as long. I feel the first 3 tracks more than make up for it though.

I have a hard time referring to the second disc as an entire song because if it was intended to be so, wouldn't they have kept in as a single track (like A Change of Seasons) instead of dividing it? Maybe it was for fans to navigate through the song with more ease or a label decision, but it's just a minor detail. There is a little bit of everything on this disc. It starts with the Overture, which from the title you can probably guess it is a classically themed instrumental, with many of the themes within later coming back at later stages of the song. About to Crash is one of the less interesting moments on the second disc, definitely the section of the song I have the hardest time remembering. The song is reprised later on in About to Crash (Reprise), which oddly enough, I prefer to the first occurrence. War Inside My Head is a brief but memorable and heavy song. Not always a fan when Labrie tries to gruff up his voice, but it's tolerable on this song. The track transitions rather nicely to another metal-inspired song, The Test That Stumped Them All, with a few curveballs in there to keep it from being a full on metal track. The next two tracks, Goodnight Kiss and Solitary Shell (with one of my favorite Rudess moments on the album), are more along the lines of ballads. Not to say that ballads are a bad thing (and you can't exactly call it a traditional ballad if there is an extended solo section, can you?). Both are beautiful songs. I've heard the comparisons between Solitary Shell and Peter Gabriel's Solisbury Hill, but I think it stands fine on it's own despite the similarity. Losing Time/Grand Finale winds down the album in an appropriate fashion.

Though not quite an essential listen, an overall great album by Dream Theater!