Fantastic album, still doing regular time in my player. Unfortunately, those longing for a return to the days (and albums) of Dream Theatre's yesterday are ultimately going to be left wanting this time around. Compared to Octavarium, this album probably went in the wrong direction for the hard-core DT fans.

Technically, the band is still miles beyond the norm (of course), but they seem to have set a little of their usual melody aside. A little more metal, a little less progressive. Every time I hear "Constant Motion" or "The Dark Eternal Night", I find myself checking to make sure I don't have Metallica's Black album in my player. Additionally, I can't help but gripe about the quasi-religious-ish lyrics that fairly saturate many songs on this album. They're honestly not powerful or interesting enough to be worth paying attention to, but they're too frequent to tune out entirely.

Despite all of the above, the driving leads, intricate ballads, and genuinely fun instrumentation and solos throughout, give this album lots of replay value. People still looping Scenes From A Memory and Budokan in their heads are probably going to come away dissatisfied, but the rest of us won't regret getting this album.