Like the album proper, the covers disc has got some good stuff and some stuff I am not interested in very much.
I definitely put Black Clouds in my bottom 3. But the thing is, at least for me, the margin between albums is very, very small. A "bottom 3" DT album for me still has some pretty spectacular music. To compare Black Clouds with an album I rank several spots higher, for example, I would say that, minute-for-minute, Black Clouds has probably about the same amount of music I really enjoy as Images & Words (as well as about the same amount of music that I don't really care for). Two things give Images a distinct edge for me: (1) the peaks are generally just higher; and (2) when it comes to the songs themselves, there's nothing in any of the songs on Images that makes me say, "I really love MOST of this song, but this one thing right here feels out of place and distracts me every time I hear it." Black Clouds has that latter factor. Even on a song as nearly-perfect as Nightmare, there's that one little bit that is really distracting to me. The Astonishing is the only other album that has that for me. In every other case, I can just take a song and either like it or don't like it. But those two albums have a few spots that are very frustrating because I am otherwise really enjoying myself, but then find myself taken out of the moment by something really distracting.