I've heard one C&C in my life and only heard it once. Might take Ruslans approach as I don't want to listen to them at all lol.
Yeah I'm doing this for C&C too even though I own the Good Apollo I'm Morning Star IV: The Writing Writer album. Also doing this with Neal Morse and Mastodon as I only own Crack the Skye.
Neal has so many albums I'll probably have to use a d20!
I appreciate this valiant, though very incorrect, effort to write out the full title for GAIBS4V1:FFTtEoM.
For Neal, I'd recommend making sure you stick with his prog albums. Those would be the first six Spock's Beard albums and these of his solo albums:
TestimonyOne?Sola ScripturaLifelineTestimony 2MomentumSola GratiaThe four Neal Morse Band albums would also qualify, but many of the songs do not satisfy the 75% Neal lead vocals rule and you'd have to check your submissions. (This applies to anyone sending NMB. Also, I volunteer to be a "checker" if anyone doesn't want to listen to the songs or doesn't know what Neal sounds like—note that it's possible to mix him up with one of the other lead singers.)
I was listening to the bands I'm unfamiliar with on my commute home. Opeth is interesting, C&C is quite good, Mastodon is Mastodon, but Neal... I just don't get it. Granted I was just getting Spotify offerings, but nothing appealed to me. The next round is going to be a grind, thank God I can't drop any further in the rankings.
I find it interesting (though not wholly unsurprising) that a lot of DT fans see absolutely nothing in Neal Morse. His music, especially his solo and NMB albums (I'm exactly the opposite of HOF in preferences), incorporates a lot of what I like most about Dream Theater on an even grander scale. The grandiosity, the setting up and reprisal of themes, the use of technicality as a way to build and express tension... these are hallmarks of Neal's post-SB prog works that are also what I love about songs like Home, Octavarium, In the Presence of Enemies, Breaking All Illusions and In the Name of God.
The reason I don't find it too surprising is because I recognize that that's only one dimension of DT's sound and that other people respond to different aspects of it, and because I recognize that NM has other elements that are pretty different from DT that people may not respond to (probably most importantly, the fact that his voice is nothing like JLB's). But I just find it interesting because they're two of my favorites for many of the same reasons.