davidn

I think this is number seven? Here's something that I found in the shared files on the network at university in 2005 or so, put up there by someone I knew as Steveo, who used to stay in the same residence as me and who is now the Earl of Cumbria or something. He was into stuff that was on the pretentious side, and alongside Stratovarius and Pink Floyd he had a fairly large collection of songs by a band I'd heard the name of called Dream Theater. Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence was the first song that I heard from them, but Scenes from a Memory is the one that has stayed in my mind the longest.

Dream Theater are possibly one of the most recognizable names in progressive rock/metal, a cousin of the power metal genre I was familiar with, where music is characterized by its length and complexity. And there's no doubt that they're a group of incredibly talented musicians, but a lot of the time I feel they lean a bit outside actual music in the traditional sense and into the territory of show-off wank that happens to be in the shape of music. Scenes from a Memory does contain a certain amount of this (take for example The Dance of Eternity, a song in every time signature known to man and some from space) but it's connected so wonderfully together, with a story about solving a murder that happened 100 years ago through what Wikipedia tells me is called past-life regression therapy. Oddly, I feel I got an even better experience out of this album by downloading the songs individually as the connection allowed, before eventually buying it for myself, rather than being able to listen to the album beginning to end at first - a mountain of themes and references are woven through its 77 minutes so I could discover them gradually song by song, and it was another step in the idea of telling stories through music that I'd come to love.

The highlight for me is the wonderful ballad The Spirit Carries On, which builds gradually into a triumphant reprise of the very start of the album. As it was one of the last songs that I downloaded, it was all the more effective at tying together the story and calling back to this simple guitar strumming that I'd heard in the opening. It made me want to take my own attempts at music in a more story-focused direction, but I wasn't anywhere near being close to being able to pull that off at the time (and doing something of this complexity will frankly always be beyond me).