1: Octavarium
Not a perfect album: there's a few songs that could have been better (namely the two ballads which, while far from the band's worst ballads, are still pretty unremarkable), but the highs are so high that they make up for all the lows, especially the title track, which is still my favorite song of all time. Plus, the album has a great flow, has a cool concept and is incredibly cohesive, which makes it more than the sum of its parts.
2: Train Of Thought
I love the heavier, more extreme sound of this album, and the first run of songs from As I Am to Honor Thy Father is almost perfect. I feel like the album starts to drag around Stream Of Consciousness though. Honor Thy Father is a great closer, but not a highlight of the album for me like it is for many people.
3: Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence
I have a very clear top two, but from this point onward my ranking start getting a bit more hazy. This album and the following one are very close, but I'm going to give the nod to this one because it has higher highs and is a bit more interesting, if not as consistent. I'm really not a fan of the second disc aside from The Test That Stumped Them All, but the first disc is pretty spectacular. With the one-two punch of The Glass Prison and Blind Faith, it definitely has the best beginning of any of their albums. Misunderstood and Disappear are also great songs that stick out in the band's catalog because they really don't have any other songs like them. The experimentation and evolution of the band's sound on this album is definitely its biggest strength and elevates it above their more predictable-sounding albums.
4: Scenes From A Memory
This is a great concept album that's very consistent in quality throughout, with the exception of Through Her Eyes which had the honor of being my least favorite song by them, at least until The Astonishing came out. That said though, pretty much every other record of theirs has at least one song that's better than anything this album has to offer, so it doesn't quite make my absolute favorites.
5: Black Clouds & Silver Linings
I think I have a soft spot for this album by virtue of it being the first of their albums that I really got into. Yeah, it has some cringe-inducing moments, but overall I think the songwriting is actually a lot better than many of their other albums. The two epics are among their finest, Wither is one of their best ballads, and The Shattered Fortress is a great capstone to the 12-Step Suite that has some really clever moments where it recontextualizes motifs from the previous movements. It's far from a perfect album, but it's one of the band's most underrated, if you ask me.
6: Dream Theater
This is the only album from the Mangini era so far that I think is legitimately good. I don't have much to say about it other than it just has a lot of great songs, and that's really all it needs. That said, I feel like there's something missing from the band's most recent albums. Some magic that's not quite there any more. Even though I like this album a lot, it doesn't quite have that "Dream Theater quality" to it that I love about the above records so much.
7: Images And Words
This is a good album. Do I love it as much as most other people? Definitely not, considering it's right in the middle of my rankings. It's an enjoyable listen throughout, and Learning To Live is definitely one of my favorite songs by them, but for whatever reason I never fell in love with this album like many others have.
8: A Dramatic Turn Of Events
Here's where we start getting into the albums that I think are flawed or okay at best. Given the circumstances surrounding this album's creation, it makes sense that the band wanted to play it safe with this album, but they went way too far. This is probably the most uninspired, by-the-numbers Dream Theater album I can think of. It's got its highlights for sure, but as a whole it just feels so unremarkable and bland that I can't say that it's a good album. The terrible production and the numerous Images And Words parallels don't help its case much either.
9: Systematic Chaos
The excellence of In The Presence Of Enemies and Constant Motion save this album from being among their absolute worst for me. The rest of the songs range from okay to flat-out bad. Moving on.
10: Falling Into Infinity
This album has virtually no middle ground. It's either fantastic or some of the worst stuff the band has ever put out. If you took out the bad songs and made Hollow Years as great as its Live At Budokan rendition, this would easily make at least the top half of the band's discography for me. Sadly, this is the album we got, and it's safe to say that I'd be completely happy with never listening to this album in its entirety ever again.
11: Awake
Yeah yeah, I know. I know a lot of people love this album, but I just don't get it. I think 6:00 and The Mirror are fantastic, and there's a few other songs here that I think are decent, but the rest is just... meh. Not bad, but nothing I ever feel the desire to listen to. Compared to the above few albums in my rankings, this album has less music that I'd consider bad, but also a lot less that I'd consider great, which is why it's among their worst for me. Outside of a few songs, this album may as well not exist for me.
12: When Dream And Day Unite
While this album is pretty amateurish and mediocre overall, there aren't really any songs on it that I'd consider among their absolute worst. Light Fuse And Get Away comes pretty close, but outside of that it's... inoffensive at worst.
13: The Astonishing
Their debut would have likely remained my least favorite album by them forever, were it not for this mess. I just don't like it. At all. There's soooo much of its painfully long runtime that's bad and barely any of it that's good. So many sappy ballads, cringe-inducing lyrics and undeveloped songs, and I hate how front-and-center the story is. Scenes From A Memory is a concept album done right; the story provides some nice context to the songs and lightly guides the overall flow of the album, at at its core it's still the music that matters the most. Here, it feels like the music is ball-gagged and chained to an incredibly unremarkable story that dictates everything it does. I appreciate the band trying something new but execution-wise I don't think they could have possibly dropped the ball any harder than they did here, and I'll just leave it at that.
Curious to see how Distance Over Time will fit in. I might return to this and give it an update after it releases and I let it sit for a while.