Damn, this thread picked up over the last couple days. A couple thoughts:
- I dig the new album cover and I've been varying degrees of excited/encouraged by just about every audio clip I've heard. I did have a chuckle when the vocal section of the official teaser came in because my first thought was that I don't have much faith in JLB to reliably hit that every night on tour
(which is fine with me by the way, I'd rather them go for whatever they think is best on the album, regardless of the feasibility of James actually singing it live)
- The rollout of the tour dates was a little odd in terms of the official poster only announcing cities and not venues and then before I saw anything else the ticket pre-sale had quietly begun.
- That said I didn't have any issue with the pre-sale itself. I bought tickets for NYC and NJ Thursday afternoon and had no problem selecting specific seats in the first five or six rows and dead center for both shows
May add Philly to the itinerary, but that's TBD a bit closer to the shows.
- As far as the tour itself, I am so fucking excited
. Scenes From A Memory is my single favorite album of all time, and I didn't become a fan until after Six Degrees had come out, so this would be my first chance to see the whole album live. Though I have seen a decent chunk of it over the years in bits and pieces, SFAM is definitely a "greater than the sum of its parts" situation for me.
- I would agree with whoever said that I&W and this are the two albums that it really makes sense to do these full anniversary celebrations. Images was their breakthrough album and remains a landmark album for the entire genre. Scenes, if I had to guess, would be most picked album if you polled all Dream Theater fans about what their favorite DT release is. I definitely don't think they're in danger of crossing the line into nostalgia act at this point. The tour is named after the new album, the poster artwork is from the new album, and then it just mentions SFAM in the second line of text. I think the band probably knew they had to get back in the good graces with a segment of the fans and certainly the promoters after the second Astonishing run seemed to have subpar attendance. So we got one tour explicitly behind a classic album, now a tour billed on a new album, where they'll also be playing a classic album, and then I'm assuming they'll be back to normal as far as setlists not featuring a whole album for the next tour.