Yay! Next one! But not a very happy one, I would think. I wonder who'll agree with this next one?
16. The Count of Tuscany
Yes, you read that right. It says 'The Count of Tuscany'. Well, I don't necessarily want to be controversial, but with picks like this one, it's just going to happen anyway. So far, I had only picked songs that are more often mentioned in the favourite 'least favourite' thread we've had over the years, but The Count of Tuscany rarely ever gets a mentioned. People apparently love this song, I've seen it in various rankings, I've seen it at live concerts and it bugs me, because this song just can't touch me in any way. Three times I have seen Dream Theater live and twice I have had this song played for me. The first time, John Petrucci completely messed up the volume swells, with some notes out of tune, feedback and whammy-bars not working. The second time, the band decided to cut all-time fan-favourite Learning to Live from the setlist, in favour of this.. the fucking Count, again! My live experiences with Dream Theater haven't really been too well and of some of the songs on this list, it's actually the live experience I had with it that made it make this list. Such is probably the case with The Count of Tuscany. I can't remember having heard this song after the last time I saw the band play it live, which was in the summer of 2011, so that's 2 years ago.
Let me get the most obvious bashing for this song out of the way first; yeah, the lyrics are hilariously bad, but if you look at them as tongue-in-cheek lyrics, they're actually quite okay. Where it goes wrong completely is with the delivery of all those lyrics. They're very bad (anyone will agree, come on! 'down the cellar stairs, I DISAPPEAR!', 'all the finest wines improve with age'), but they're delivered with so much seriousness that you can't possibly believe them. The completely opposite goes for The Dark Eternal Night for instance. That song is just so ridiculously silly and the band knows it. The lyrics are bad, but the delivery of them is fun. TDEN is actually a fun song, The Count of Tuscany is not. The lyrics are apparently meant to be taken seriously and that sole fact brings this song down. But we're not done there yet. Although the intro is very beautiful and probably one of the better openings for any song the band has done, I have zero incentive to listen to this track for all the other instrumentation in the song. The riffs in the first part are repetitive to me and the ending is everything but 'grand' or 'epic'. Instead of a 'bang' of a balloon popping, it's more like a 'fizzz', you know.. when you let all the air out. And then my biggest gripe: those god-damn volume swells. There was absolutely no need for that at all. It just seems like a completely lazy attempt to abridge two different pieces of music (that are actually linked by sharing similar chord progression) by playing the melodies of the upcoming part very slowly on just a guitar using volume swells. It drags the song down from semi-alright riffing (as stated, I find them to be boring rehashed riffs mostly) to a complete snooze-fest of nothing interesting happening at all. The part that follows then lacks any uplifting qualities that could ever bring the song back to the glorious moments in the very intro. From the moment the song starts, it goes downhill very quickly and never up again. A very disappointing ending to a disappointing album, as far as I'm considered. I would love to never hear this song again volutarily; and definitely not in a live setting. It's even worse there.
(Excuse my negativity; I'll respect anyone who does like this song, although I also respectfully disagree)