An extremely uneven album showcasing some of the best and worst of the band. Petrucci has 3 of his best solos on here, there's a satisfying conclusion to the generally dull AA Suite, a touching (but, again, uneven) song to Portnoy's father, and to my ears the band's single greatest song - The Count of Tuscany (which naturally got my vote in this poll).
But it also contains prime examples of some of the things which made me a bit tired of this band in the late 2000s. Jordan's widdly keyboard solo in The Shattered Fortress is, to me, aimless. In their greatest and most inspired songs, a DT solo takes the tune from one place to the next, but here it only fills space. A Rite of Passage is twice as long as it needed to be (and again contains much space-filling soloing), and A Nightmare to Remember is one of the band's very rare musical and lyrical abominations. I know it's been 'discussed' to death, but the growling section of this song, even with the growls themselves aside, may 'make sense' (as I've often heard it said), but making sense isn't everything. There are such things are taste and lyrical skill also. It's dreadful to me, it didn't so much jump a shark as orbit the South China Sea, it's mind-numbingly, astonishingly terrible from a band of this calibre. The ineptitude and incompetence of the lyrics and musical choices on this song blow my mind.
So, yes, very much a love/hate scenario with this album. It has superb moments, but on the whole it's all over the place, it's very much the sound of a band which was tired, straining and in the process of breaking apart.