I can see that line of thinking working, almost where, in a journey that long, there are gonna be ups and downs, and enjoying them all is part of the journey. I get it. But like you said, it is soooooo long (kind of like SB's Snow) that listening to the whole thing almost takes setting part of your day aside, and who has time for that? But my beef is that too many musical sections are reprised too many times. I can deal with the length, but it's almost like Neal wrote so many lyrics to tell his long story, and instead of writing that much music, he wrote a bunch and then just decided to use tons of reprises to get out of writing as much music as he did lyrics. Typing that almost sounds goofy, as Neal is such a prolific writer than it is hard to imagine that he would have had a shortage of musical ideas to fill up even a double album, but I am just saying, that is how it sometimes comes across to me. I get that it helps with the musical continuity, but after a while, it's like, did we really need to hear that musical theme again?
In the case of T2, I agree that is more of a regular album, almost like snapshots of stuff he didn't fully touch on on the first Testimony album, but it is still his best overall album, IMO. For me, many of the best solo songs he has written are on T2, and there are no weaker songs or spots at all.
Look at it this way - the musical reprises provide a sort of continuity to the story. Does anyone blame Dream Theater for using the "Regression" musical progression again in "The Spirit Carries On"? Sure it's a SMALLER reprise, and not as frequent, but SFAM was a single disc album.
I think, as a biographical album of Neal's life, the musical reprises show us that they are things that are consistent through HIS life, and are constant, and they show that his life isn't a singular linear journey in a new direction, but rather a bunch of circles and turns that sometimes return to various points in his life, be it places, or people, or things, and perhaps those musical themes are representative of those recurrences. I mean, if you have a job, you go to work everyday. If you wrote a concept album about your job, you'd probably write a "Clock-in theme", a "lunch-hour theme", a "here comes that hot co-worker theme", and use them in reprises.
I think, for
Teastimony, it CAN get a little tedious, but it IS a 2-hour album, so there's bound to be a lot of repetition. Had albums like
The Wall or
Tommy or
The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway been over 120 minutes, you can be they would've had more musical reprises than they already did.
-Marc.