I was being sarcastic. I actually don't think it's a "bad" album. It's just not my cup of tea. I'm not one of those people who thinks it's just garbage. There's actually a few really good songs scattered across those two discs.
If they could have culled it down to one disc of the best material I probably would have liked it and listened to it a lot more.
Wow - you could have done this years ago. You could do it now and possibly have a different opinion about the album.
Uh, OK, but this assumes that I
want to do something like that and it misses the point I was making. I didn't say "If
I could have culled it down" (I both could have and did cull it down) I said "If
they could have culled it down" Meaning, if
they could have made the album shorter
themselves. I'm not referring to just taking the best tracks from it and ditching the rest. I did that a week after it came out, but even the best material from this album is just kind of there. And bastardizing it like that makes the story completely opaque and pointless. So it becomes a collection of 7 or 8 decent, but mostly disjointed tracks that just don't scratch my Dream Theater itch. What's the point of listening to 1/3 of a concept album?
I have a collection of Dream Theater songs compiled into a big playlist and some of the tracks from this album made the cut along with a few selected tracks from some of the other Dream Theater albums I'm not very fond of like Octavarium, Systematic Chaos, Falling Into Infinity and the self-titled album.
But I would have preferred a single-album and not a Frankenstein's partial mix of what I consider the best tracks, but a completed piece of work by the artist themselves.