I mean conceptually it's fine as a stand-alone thing, but when you start lining up all of his albums and they all follow the same structure, it gets annoying.
Well, first of all, this is an album by
Flying Colors, not
Neal Morse, and sure his name is attached to it, but there's also the minds of Portnoy, LaRue, Morse and MacPherson as well. For all we know, one of the other guys wrote that song. Neal has admitted to taking a bit of a backseat on this project, and from the sound of it, I hear more guitar and vocals and bass than I do keys, and none of the samples from the EPK even have lead vocals from Neal, so this be a case where Neal isn't a majority here.
Also, Neal's albums are all about as different from each other as his albums were with Spock's Beard (which seem to be a bit more similar in of themselves, especially
The Light through V). However, they are a bit similar to OTHER albums he has done...
Testimony - Double album with chunks of music (Parts) that tell different sections of the story (Classic Concept Story album, like
Snow)
One - Album with a few long songs/epics, a lot of short songs, and none of them segue
? - A "single-song" album with each movement divided into 12 smaller parts (This format revisited later with
The Whirlwind)
Sola Scriptura - Album with 3 huge epics, and one small song (kind of like
Bridge Across Forever)
Lifeline - Opening epic, followed by 4 short songs, a HUGE epic, and closed with a short song (this format, aside from the closer, is similar to
V)
Testimony 2 - Structurally similar to
Testimony, but for obvious reasons, as it is a continuation.
To me, each of his albums are all structurally different, despite them SOUNDING the same in some parts (like a theme in "The Creation" sounds a bit similar to a theme from
Testimony), but that's just how Neal writes. His songs tend to influence each other, but I think having Mike on his albums helps keep him from repeating himself lately (as noted in Randy's recent Studio Diary entry).
-Marc.