Black Clouds & Silver Linings: Reactions

[ariich]

the really emotional songs like ... the count of tuscany

This made me chuckle

Yeah it sounds weird but I think the second half of the song is pure brilliance built on sheer emotion, too bad the first half doesn´t lead smoothly and coherently to the conclusion.

Oh I know what you mean, the vocal delivery in particular gets very emotional, and the music does somewhat as well. But the lyrics are the least emotional thing ever

Though I disagree that the first half doesn't flow into the second.

[Scrub206]

im obsessed with the count of tuscany.. its bad lol

[LordCaptainMcKlockenstein]

im obsessed with the count of tuscany.. its bad lol

The song or your obsession?

[Plasmastrike]

im obsessed with the count of tuscany.. its bad lol

The song or your obsession?

Obviously he means the obsession

[LordCaptainMcKlockenstein]

Obviously he means the obsession

Way to ruin my fun. 

[Plasmastrike]

Obviously he means the obsession

Way to ruin my fun. 

[lateralus88]

Well, what can I say about BC and SL today?
ANTR, TCOT and The Shattered Fortress survived until today...

But I thought that everyone survived?

[cookienut]

Well, what can I say about BC and SL today?
ANTR, TCOT and The Shattered Fortress survived until today...

But I thought that everyone survived?

Roar?

[Jamesman42]

BUMP

Interesting to read this as ADTOE is a little over a week away from coming out.

[DarkLord_Lalinc]

lol my opinions


nice bump, jamesmang.

[Ħ]

I think I originally voted "up there with the best of them" but now I'd say "it's OK".

[Jamesman42]

Yeah, I didn't say it in here, but I remember saying it was my absolute favorite at the time. That was some sheer fanboyism.

Nowadays, it's not nearly as good IMO. It does have a top 5 song in TCOT, and TSF is awesome on all fronts, with Wither being a gem as well, but the other 3 songs are average to below average. Only certain parts of the other 3 are really good, namely Beautiful Agony and the solo in TBOT (a top 5 JP solo for me, ironically).

Ranking:

TCOT
TSF
Wither
TBOT
ANTR
AROP

[FlyingBIZKIT]

It's good. Better than Awake....


TCOT
TBOT
ANTR
TSF
AROP
Wither

[Jamesman42]

Oh, let's rank the albums as well:

1. SDOIT
2. TOT
3. 8VM
4. IaW
5. Awake

6. BCSL
7. FII

8. SFAM
9. SC
10. WDADU

[FlyingBIZKIT]

1. SDOIT
2. FII
3. SFAM
4. I&W
5. TOT
6. BCSL
7. AWAKE
8. 8VM
9. WDADU
10. SC

[LCArenas]

It has aged on me in a mixed way. Wither and The Count of Tuscany have grown on me a lot. TSF and TBOT haven't aged differently, AROP is still in the bottom of the album, and ANTR hasn't aged well for me, except for the Beautiful Agony part.

My opinions?
-The Count of Tuscany is the best song off SC/BC&SL. Even with the over the top lyrics.
-The Best of Times' solo is still a top-5 Petrucci solo for me.
-I'm really happy that ADTOE has 9 tracks. I never liked BC&SL having only Six Songs. Yes, they're long, but it still feels short to me, and unlike Six Degrees (Third best DT album IMO), the songs are not as varied.
-Wither is better than Forsaken. Forsaken has a better solo, though.
-This is the album when I realized the trade-off solos were getting stale.

When I heard it the first time I thought it was a definite improvement over Systematic Chaos but it was slightly less better than Octavarium. Still think that.

Current Rankings on the Album?
-The Count of Tuscany
-Wither
-A Nightmare to Remember
-The Best of Times
-The Shattered Fortress
-A Rite of Passage

Current Rankings on the Discography?
-The Triad of Masterpiece-
1. Awake
2. Images & Words (Almost tied with Awake)
3. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence
------------------------------------------------------
-Amazing Albums-
4. Scenes from a Memory
5. Octavarium / Falling into Infinity
------------------------------------------------------
-Very Good Albums-
7. Black Clouds and Silver Linings
8. Train of Thought
------------------------------------------------------
-"Good" Albums-
9. Systematic Chaos
10. When Dream and Day Unite

[theseoafs]

I wasn't here when this thread came about, so I figure I'll post my "reactions" now. #fashionablylate

1. A Nightmare to Remember: One of the album's best tracks and also the album's least consistent track. Not much I can say here that hasn't been said before, but I'll say it anyway: the first 8-9 minutes of this song are completely kickass. The first third, had it been more fleshed out, would be a solid contender for DT's best ultra-heavy tune, rivaling The Glass Prison and This Dying Soul, and the second third is pure proggy bliss. Things start to fall apart at the 9-minute mark: after a shaky transition into a completely unnecessary solo trade-off section over one of the least exciting riffs in DT's catalogue, we go into a reprise of the gothic theme from the beginning, and into one of DT's worst moments, MP's rap-growl-roar thing. I hate it on the studio track, but from what I've seen on Youtube it's even worse live because MP apparently thinks this is the most BA thing the band's ever produced. I don't have to tell you guys about how silly "Everyone survived roar" is, so I won't. (The riff which follows at 12:06 is the exception to the larger rule of the third act: I LOVE this riff and wish I'd heard a little bit more of it in the song.) From there, it's the DT epic-by-numbers: you've got your reprise of the original riff (though thrown into a different time signature for The Sake of Prog), a reprise of the (admittedly killer) chorus, and instrumental wankery to end. Anyway, had DT found a better transition to a more concise instrumental, this would undoubtedly be a new DT classic. As it stands, it's a great song that isn't great all the way through.

2. A Rite of Passage: DT on autopilot and the album's worst track by far. Make a brief sketch of a typical 8-minute DT song (which for most will look like extended intro-verse-chorus-slightly modified verse-chorus-super instrumental-chorus one more time for good measure), and you've got this song. There is absolutely nothing notable about this written-in track.

3. Wither: Now that's more like it. A not necessarily mind-blowing but nonetheless beautiful ballad featuring some haunting lyrics. (Kind of funny how the song which isn't about anything other than writing lyrics (or failing to write lyrics, as it were) has the best lyrics on the album, huh?) Great tune.

4. The Shattered Fortress: MP was tired of the AA saga at this point, and it shows. Now, the saga wasn't a complete failure, as we got The Glass Prison and This Dying Soul out of it, but it was definitely a mistake. A single "epic" track would have been much more effective in retrospect; even throwing in a fifteen-minute piece on Octavarium covering steps 6-12 in a concise manner once MP realized how big of an undertaking the suite would otherwise be would have been preferable to doing the suite as it was initially envisioned and filling the latter half with uninteresting, seemingly contractually-obligated music. The suite as a whole is a bit confusing; you've got four of DT's heaviest tracks mixed in with Repentance. Had it been a concept album, it would have been lambasted for its lack of dynamics and excessive repetition both musically and lyrically. Played live in its entirety, it would surely tire out the musicians long before the end of the hour set. I like to refer to the AA saga as Dream Theater's great failed experiment, and if you ask me to rank the songs in order of quality, I will always put them in chronological order (and not by coincidence).

Having said that, DT could have gone two ways with this one: they could have composed an original piece which, if nothing else, could bring something new to the proverbial table while reprising some familiar themes, which all the previous parts succeeded in doing, or they could have redone every slightly notable theme in the saga with only minor variations to make for some sort of big finale. They unfortunately chose the second option, and The Shattered Fortress is a jumbled mess of riffs and themes which, had it been a completely original piece of music without the rest of the saga to back it up, would make absolutely no sense structurally. As it stands, it still doesn't make that much sense structurally. It is INCREDIBLY disappointing to recognize that literally every second of this song (apart from the fade-in intro and Responsible's spectacular verse, which is in my mind this song's claim to fame) is at best inspired by and at worst directly copied from another produced and released song just comes off as lazy. It's ineffective as a piece of music, as a conclusion, and as a song, and the power of the final verse keeps it from taking the title of "Just Plain The Worst Song" from A Rite of Passage, BC&SL's other "Black Cloud".

5. The Best of Times: The undisputed best track. A great tune from the incredibly musically interesting beginning to the ending solo, one of JP's best. This is a ballad of extended length which is shockingly NOT ruined by an out-of-place instrumental, and thank the heavens for it. Lyrics are a little sketchy at times, but it's not a song-ruining thing (see below). A top-ten DT song and the best non-Octavarium thing to come out of DT's post-6DOIT era.

6. The Count of Tuscany: A difficult song to review. There's the intro, which is a work of proggy genius. After four minutes or so we fall into the main groove of the song's first act, which is decidedly less proggy and genius. Then the lyrics start. Much has been written about the lyrics, and I get the lyrics' irony and how it's just a fun song that doesn't take itself seriously, but I can't do it. These are lyrics of a song-ruining caliber (the worst offender is "making me uptight, no accident", I find). Seriously terrible, and after that genius introduction I expected something a little bit more weighty or clever than "This guy is scary with his wines and bearded brother, he's definitely going to kill me and eat me, oh wait no he's not", and even then the lyrics . And had the music underneath these lyrics been exceptionally interesting, I would have easily forgiven the sin, but it's fairly standard stuff (as DT's stuff goes). A pretty simple riff under a pretty simple chord progression in a pretty simple verse-chorus structure, really (though the chorus mentioned in that verse-chorus structure is probably the first half's best part). Then we get to the volume swells, pretty cool stuff, but nothing revolutionary. Acoustic verse is melodically interesting but once again the lyrics sort of devalue the entire thing. The music underscoring and following the song's final verse is really quite interesting, but all things considered after listening to this song I just feel like something's missing. I feel like I listened to DT attempting to write a game-changing epic along the lines of A Change of Seasons or Octavarium without having a game-changing lyrical or musical concept, and that's basically what I did. It's a paradoxically lyrically-based song with no real lyrical progression and a largely instrumental epic with few really engaging riffs. On the whole, it's a good song. There's no disputing that. It's just not a great song, and if you're going to devote 20 minutes and the coveted album-closing spot to a song, it should be, right? It feels sort of unfinished and weird.

On the whole: It's a good album. A seriously good album and the band's best since Train of Thought. But its best songs are seriously fundamentally flawed: Nightmare has some fatal structural issues and some of MP's most embarrassing input and The Count of Tuscany's attempt to marry a heavy thematic instrumental with unquestionably silly lyrics is just short of being a complete failure. But where this album wins, it wins HARD. (Conversely, where it loses, it loses hard. Really hard.)

[bss4life15]

This album aged like milk for me.  I loved it and thought it was their best album for the first few months, but  now i rarely listen to it and it usually bores me all the way up to TBOT and TCOT.
Song rankings
1.TBOT
2.TCOT
3.ANTR
4.TSF
5.AROP
6.Wither
Album rankings
1.Six Degrees
2.Falling into Infinity
3.Awake
4.Systematic Chaos
5.Images and Words
6.Scenes From A Memory
7.Train Of Thought
8.When Dream And Day Unite
9.Black Clouds & Silver Linings
10.Octavarium

[BanksD]

I've only actually listened to this album 3 times in full.


Don't get me wrong it's a good album, but imo their weakest.

[Jamariquay]

I listened to A Nightmare To Remember the other day. It got pretty boring pretty fast. This song did not need to be 16 minutes long. Maybe 10. Beautiful Agony is still good, and I like other pieces here and there, but it really is the clearest example of what I've come to dislike about the band over the last few releases.

I still like Shattered Fortress up til the ROAE reprise, then it's like they stopped trying to do anything new with the song. A while back, I made an edit that cuts out the keyboard solo entirely (transitions from the Repentance reprise right into the TDS mellow part) and I think it works much better.

A Rite Of Passage bores me.

The Best Of Times would have been fine if they'd ended it around the 7-minute mark. I've noticed all the parts that make me cringe happen after that. The solo just seems kinda cliched now. I still enjoy the Rush opening I guess.

Wither is fine. Good song.

The Count Of Tuscany is also a good song. I still like the intro and outro a great deal, and I never understood how anyone could possibly be offended by the lyrics/vocals. No real complaints here, just confusion with regards to why the rest of the songs aren't like this.


Overall, this album really hasn't aged well for me. It seems overindulgent and aimless, like they didn't really know what else to do. Mostly it's just frustrating, because I know they're all capable of doing some truly awesome stuff when they're inspired to.

[energythief]

things

Excellent assessment. Thanks for articulating what I feel.

[Jamesman42]

I listened to A Nightmare To Remember the other day. It got pretty boring pretty fast. This song did not need to be 16 minutes long. Maybe 10. Beautiful Agony is still good, and I like other pieces here and there, but it really is the clearest example of what I've come to dislike about the band over the last few releases.

I still like Shattered Fortress up til the ROAE reprise, then it's like they stopped trying to do anything new with the song. A while back, I made an edit that cuts out the keyboard solo entirely (transitions from the Repentance reprise right into the TDS mellow part) and I think it works much better.

A Rite Of Passage bores me.

The Best Of Times would have been fine if they'd ended it around the 7-minute mark. I've noticed all the parts that make me cringe happen after that. The solo just seems kinda cliched now. I still enjoy the Rush opening I guess.

Wither is fine. Good song.

The Count Of Tuscany is also a good song. I still like the intro and outro a great deal, and I never understood how anyone could possibly be offended by the lyrics/vocals. No real complaints here, just confusion with regards to why the rest of the songs aren't like this.


Overall, this album really hasn't aged well for me. It seems overindulgent and aimless, like they didn't really know what else to do. Mostly it's just frustrating, because I know they're all capable of doing some truly awesome stuff when they're inspired to.

I don't see you around here much, so I hope to see your assessment of ADTOE in the appropriate thread. I enjoy reading your opinions.

[theseoafs]

things

Excellent assessment. Thanks for articulating what I feel.

Yeah, I realized after posting that what I wrote was unnecessarily long. Definitely took a page from A Nightmare to Remember's book right there.

[SystematicThought]

I had this in the car the other day and something dawned on me. I really hate the way MP's drums sound on this album, the toms don't sound too great on fills, especially in ANTR. I just am not a fan of drum production on this album.

[mrjazzguitar]

Current Rankings on the Discography?
-The Triad of Masterpiece-
1. Awake
2. Images & Words (Almost tied with Awake)
3. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence
------------------------------------------------------
-Amazing Albums-
4. Scenes from a Memory
5. Octavarium / Falling into Infinity
------------------------------------------------------
-Very Good Albums-
7. Black Clouds and Silver Linings
8. Train of Thought
------------------------------------------------------
-"Good" Albums-
9. Systematic Chaos
10. When Dream and Day Unite

this is exactly how I feel.

[bss4life15]

I had this in the car the other day and something dawned on me. I really hate the way MP's drums sound on this album, the toms don't sound too great on fills, especially in ANTR. I just am not a fan of drum production on this album.

I loved the drum sound on the album, the drumming itself is pretty bland though.

[Jamariquay]

I don't see you around here much, so I hope to see your assessment of ADTOE in the appropriate thread. I enjoy reading your opinions.

Thanks, likewise. I'll see what I can do.

[ElliottTamer]

1. A Nightmare to Remember didn't age very well for me, but I still like it quite a lot. Yes, despite the wankery...
2. A Rite of Passage aged a little better for me, but it was always the weakest song in the album for me. Still, solid song, in my opinion.
3. Wither was a great hit with me back when the album was released and has aged quite well, I must say. Still a great song as far as I'm concerned.
4. The Shattered Fortress grew on me quite dramatically. Originally I did not like it much, but over the past couple of years I came back to it constantly, always finding better things about it. Right now it's probably my favourite AA song.
5. The Best of Times didn't age at all for me. It was a great, beautiful song when it was released and held up perfectly.
6. The Count of Tuscany. Definitely Top 10 for me, possibly top 5 (and I'm talking just songs here, not exclusively DT). A masterpiece, unless the lyrics really bother you, which is not my case.

So all in all, I'd say I still like BC&SL quite a lot, even in comparison with their other albums. Not my favourite, but definitely up there.

[cramx3]

I thought very highly of this album when it came out and I still think it's thier third best behind Images and Words and Awake.  I find myself listening to it more than any other DT album lately.

[darkshade]

Their best album since Six Degrees. Top 5 best albums by them. Loved it when it came out, and still do. I have a feeling my appreciation of it will grow even more in the context of ADTOE.

[j]

VERY interesting to read the first page of this thread.

I remember when I first listened to BC&SL, I was somewhat unimpressed overall when I got to TCOT, but I was pretty floored by that song: it alone managed to inflate my opinion of the album quite a bit simply by being the last thing I heard, I think.  It's the only song from BC&SL that I ever feel the urge to listen to anymore, the rest of the tracks have some good parts sprinkled throughout a lot of not-good.  Still probably better than the three efforts before it.

I&W
Awake
SDOIT
FII
SFAM
WDADU
BC&SL
8VM
SC
ToT

-J

[Elite]

All the songs on the album have aged like milk for me. Maybe Wither and The Count of Tuscany I'd listen to sometimes and The Shattered Fortress is much fun to play on the guitar, but a bad song anyway.

Ranking of songs on the album:

1. Wither
2. The Count of Tuscany
3. The Shattered Fortress
4. A Nightmare to Remember
5. The Best of Times
6. A Rite if Passage (one of the all time lows in DT's discography if you ask me)

While we're at it:

Album rankings:

1. Images & Words
2. Awake
3. Falling into Infinity
4. Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes from a Memory
5. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence (continuous albums lols.)
6. When Dream And Day Unite
7. Systematic Chaos
8. Train of Thought
9. Octavarium
10. Black Clouds & Silver Linings

There you have it, it's at the bottom.
Yeah, my list is like a downward spiral through time, let's hope A Dramatic Turn of Events will be good 

[Ħ]

A Nightmare to Remember - I think that it's got one of the best DT intros I've heard (which is everything).  Beautiful agony is great too.  The rest drags it down so much though.

A Rite of Passage - I won't skip it, but I never really go to it.

Wither - Same as AROP.  I actually think that Wither is way overrated.  I just think that it should be quieter, seeing as it's a ballad, but it's such a noisy tune.

The Shattered Fortress - Still love it, except for the silly spoken word section.

The Best of Times - Don't get the hate.  But I don't love it.  It's okay.

The Count of Tuscany - I really overrated this track early on.  It's not that great.  It's just okay.  I mean, the intro and outro are gold, but the rest is just meh.

Overall, like I said before, BCSL was a top 4 album now in the bottom 3.

[Psy]

It'll be interesting to see how ADTOE stands the test of time because BC&SL just doesn't hold up for me as I haven't played it in a long time and I don't really have any interest in doing so either. =\

[IdoSC]

It's one of my 2 least favorite DT albums (the other one being SC), although I enjoy each one of their albums quite a lot so I consider it okay.