Eat this, natives
47. OVERTURE 
Overture is one of the very few songs I never actually made mind on, in the way that I never took the time to reflect on my real liking of it. This is probably due to it being a one-off song, that can be hardly related to much of the band's catalogue that has not been printed on the same disc. It is an instrumental track, possiblbly the one of them that get most often overlooked when it comes to making rakings and best ofs, which serves as the bombastic lead in to the epic suit that gives the name to the universally liked 2002 album, and as such encapsules in their embryonic form all the themes that would later be developed in each of the following song. There's nothing amiss in this song: quiet moment, hints of turbulence to come (the war inside theme), some of the most epic themes written by the band (the SDOIT-theme guitar solo). What prevents me from ranking this song way higher is there is too much stuff thrown together, making the song lacking structure-wise, at least in my opinion. On a side note, I must admit that, as a mainly live recordings listener, a song that can't be played live is not keen to becoming a favourite.
46.NEW MILLENNIUM Another song I always, until recently, failed to appreciate even in some parts. Although I have since mostly changed my mind, I still agree with what James said about the song when asked to name his most and least favourite song. I love the instrumental side of the track, but I can’t relate to the melody, nor to the lyrics. Which is a real pity, since some bits of the song are among the best instrumental moments of the album. Still, I never skip the first two minutes of the song when they show up on my ipod.
45. BLIND FAITH This is probably the greatest DT song I don’t enjoy listening. I did, once, roughly two years ago, when it even cracked my top ten, only to sink very low in a few weeks. It’s an incredible song, with strong lyrics (James LaBrie never let us down) and great instrumentation. I know very few who wouldn’t agree on the BF unison to be among the best (and most difficult) unison the band wrote, and even fewer who would not consider the previous piano solo meaningful and tasty. It’s Dream Theater at their best, and arguably one of the instrumental highlights of the 21st century DT. Just, however hard I tried in the recent past, I never got to enjoy listening to it anymore.
44. ENDLESS SACRIFICE If Blind Faith was a song I used to love and that has since sunk in my liking, Endless Sacrifice is a track I used to hate until it showed up the setlists last years. I had listened to older live performances of the song, mainly Budokan and other bootlegs from the same period, but even then, the song seemed to me to be missing a critical spark of life, something making everything work correctly. The song is quite good, but I’ve always found it to suffer an overlong instrumental section right in the middle of the song, effectively breaking it in halves. As much as I love extensive instrumental sections, the risk of having them interrupt the narrative process of the song is not to be ignored, and yet it often results in epic achievements (Metropolis, Octavarium -
/
). Endless Sacrifice is an example of this not happening. Nonetheless, the live strength of a songs is not completely tied to how highly one thinks of them in the beginning. This is why I, quite surprisingly I must admit, found myself to enjoy listening ES on the new (scarse, but whatever) batch of bootlegs taped last year. I finally found the spark is was looking for in this song, and couldn’t find in the studio version nor in the older live performances. So, if you happen to run into a 2011 bootleg, consider giving Endless Sacrifice a spin!
Topic: Official DT Top 50 Thread Mark II (bss4life15 up now - starting page 79) (Read 256532 times)