I think its about time they reinvent their epic structure, The Whirlwind was a nice start, a full album epic with seperate tracks.
Agreed. I loved that they went with mostly shorter songs on The Whirlwind, but presented them in concept album-like form, so it all flows together, while still being able to take most of the songs on their own.
Even though I really like Kaleidoscope, it seemed like they took the lazy "we'll combine the structure of the first two albums" approach:
-Bookending the album with two long epics, ala Bridge Across Forever.
-Track 2 being an acoustic-driven, laid back tune, ala SMPTe.
-Track 3 being a "short" rocker, ala SMPTe
-Track 4 being what is basically a piano-driven Neal Morse solo song, ala Bridge Across Forever.
My suspicion is that they go into this thinking, "We have to be as epic as possible," which is not bad considering how well they do epics, but I'd love to see them go back to The Whirlwind-type format on the 5th album: focusing more on shorter songs, and if they can make a long conceptual thing out of it again, cool, and if not, so be it.