Octavarium
- I just think it's cooler. Six Degrees lays on the epicness so thick. Octavarium, for a 24 minute epic with an orchestral ending, is subtle. When Losing Time comes in the strings and the big guitar chords and the thundering drums scream THIS IS AN EPIC CONCLUSION at you. Razor's Edge isn't so in your face. You can hear the backing piano and even the bass doing a cool swell. The drums and guitar are more complex. By being understated, it comes off much more natural and self-assured. It trusts its own composition.
- For those who don't know, the lyrics in Six Degrees are based on a series of psychological case studies found in some book. JP and MP took them and turned them into song lyrics. The sections written in first person (WIMH, TTTSTA, GK, ATC(r)) work really well, but the other sections feel impersonal because they are. Octavarium's lyrics are weird, but by being less on the nose they actually work a lot better. For example - You don't think that the character in Medicate Me was in a literal coma, do you? When you look deeper, the song because a far more interesting story about someone going insane than the song literally about insanity.
- Octavarium is much better composed. Six Degrees feels episodic. Most of the song never repeats any themes from the Overture. On the other hand, Medicate Me is the only section of Octavarium that doesn't every section of Octavarium sets-up, pays off, or echos a theme that appears more than once in the song (the crazy instrumental section uses a rephrased version of the moog solo's main melody).
EDIT: Credit to robwebster for pointing out the Medicate Me's chorus melody is a rephrasing of the song's very ending melody.