Been listening to their middle albums a lot and I realized something. After Scenes From a Memory, the band went in a much more “metal” direction. Every album from 6-10 is a heavy metal album with the exception of maybe Octavarium. On albums 1-5 the band had a much more...prog sound. The prog took precedence over the metal aspect. Don’t get me wrong, albums 6-10 are still very proggy, but they never QUITE went into full on heavy metal mode until Six Degrees. Especially on TOT, SC and BCASL you can see the metal overtaking the prog sound, a lot of the “magic” that is heard on albums like Awake and SFAM...is kinda lost. They lost a lot of that atmosphere. It makes even more sense when you listen to ADTOE and you’re like “damn...that’s the sound that’s been missing”. Even DT12 was a very atmospheric album, even if the quality of some the songs weren’t really up to par.
You can just tell that Portnoy was kinda taking over the band’s sound in a lot of ways. Songs like ANTR, HTF, CM, TDEN, etc.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the 12 Step Suite, and I love a lot of the songs on albums 6-10, but by the time SC and BCASL came out, you can really hear a band struggling to find its identity. Then when you listen to ADTOE the band sounds right at home, more focused, they’re able to breathe a lot more, etc. It’s like when a 16 year old kid’s parents go away and he immediately invites all his friends over to drink and stuff...the band just feels like a weight has been lifted off them. I feel like Portnoy was holding them back tbh. You might disagree and that’s fine. But while I do think Portnoy was the better drummer, I’m happy Mangini is in the band now. DOT is slowly creeping up to becoming one of my favorite DT albums, and ADTOE is my #2 album by them. If they had kept going in the BCASL direction, we wouldn’t have gotten these great albums. It’s really hard to explain fully, but there was not a certain...magic in the first five albums that kinda dropped at some point after that, and only resurfaced with ADTOE. It was like this epic, emotional, almost symphonic feel to their music that got drowned out.
Btw, I still think Six Degrees and TOT are fantastic albums, but it doesn’t change my point that the band kinda started losing their magic after SFAM. They had a certain sound that was lost in albums 6-10. Maybe you know what I mean.