My biggest issue with Dream Theater's albums is that they're too good. They're all such technically brilliant musicians that the collective mind comes across as being boring. They, like so many indie bands, seem to deliberately avoid the simple and aim for over complication. "We must not follow C by an F, that's so pop!" A song twenty minute song with too many ideas begins to sound like static. The only album of theirs I've ever enjoyed is "Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory", which by it's nature (a concept album telling one story) had enough repeating elements to hide the wankiness.

Their latest album Train of Thought is a step in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. They've stripped back much of the deliberate complication and taken on a more heavy metal ideal, the end result sounding like a fantastic jam of Pantera, Metallica and Megadeth. It's often called "the album Metallica should have made instead of St. Anger" and the first thing I thought was that this album picks up where Metallica left off after Metallica (Black).

Simple, chunky riffs, less deliberate antipop and less deliberate pop. No divas singing. Much less keyboard. An excellent album, ruined only by the occational inappropriately fast and tuneless guitar solo (much like some Metallica albums actually, anything Kirk ever did was just so much wahwah) and that track (Endless Sacrifice) that rips off the main riff for Michael Jackson's Give In To Me [Dangerous], a fatal mistake Dream Theater seem too often to make.