I've been trying to think of another band who has done something like this with the multiple versions of the "same" album and I'm coming up empty.
Has this ever been done like this before?
The closest I could think of is The Gentle Storm - The Diary. There are two versions, one called Gentle, which is more calmer and stripped back, almost acoustic, and folky. And The Storm, which is more in the metal vein, energetic, and a bit more epic.
It is interesting how we only got these versions because of circumstance. If Covid hadn't happened, we would've gotten Forevermore, and since it did happen, it brought The Breath of Life to fruition. Which leads to Mike Portnoy wanting to combine both, if he is someone like me who likes to combine two different versions.
It's what I did with The Gentle Storm. I combined both The Storm and Gentle versions of The Storm into one song.
The closest thing I have in my collection is PFM used to release English and Italian versions of their albums. That was obviously a pretty different thing, but the songs were re-recorded for the English versions and the lyrics were actually new lyrics in English, not a translation of the Italian lyrics. In the case of Photos of Ghosts (English version of Per Un Amico), there was also one original new song released and the song Celebration was an English version of a song off Storia di un Minuto, so that was kind of a totally different release in a lot of ways even though a lot of the music was the same as on Per Un Amico.
I had completely forgotten about The Gentle Storm and the two versions of the album, nice call, Ben_Jamin
Opeth also did the two versions of the same album but in different languages thing, but I don't like the band, so I don't know how different both versions are.
Bela Fleck & The Flecktones made a 3 disc concept album titled Little Worlds and were asked by their label to release a shorter version, which was only 10 tracks/1 disc called "Ten From Little Worlds", with a few abridged versions/remixes. It's the closest thing to TAU I could think of.
Apart from that, I've seen a band make a studio album, and then release a live album of it, an acoustic version of the album and also the remixes album, but that wasn't anything related to prog
Perhaps it will start a trend in the prog world? It appears to have been quite successful for Transatlantic
I wouldn't count on it being a new trend, or at least I hope it doesn't become one
I think it went relatively well fot TA because it's a novelty, but I can definitely see people getting pissed if all of the sudden many bands start to do this in order to sell more versions of their albums