Dream Theater are the ultimate love them/hate them band.  There seems to be little to no middle ground - you either like the band or you don’t.  The haters are of the opinion that their music is only about showing off their instrumental skills.  The fans think their music is the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I like them for their superior technical skills.  The three original founding members all went to the Berklee School of Music and are classically trained.  The current keyboard player adds immensely to the DT sound and all four of them together are quite amazing.  The vocalist is not the best around, and at times, his voice doesn’t sit well with the music, but he’s an integral part of the DT sound.  The theatrics are all part of DT’s persona.  Remember, they call themselves Dream Theater, and they try to live up to the image it brings up.  This also means that they are not afraid to show off their chops.  While that tends to get excessive on certain songs, on the whole, I think DT are a good band.  Anyway, here’s my DT top ten.  And, as I mentioned in the last installment, this list is not going to fit on a standard CD.

10. Constant Motion - SYSTEMATIC CHAOS - 6:55

9. Learning to Live - IMAGES AND WORDS - 11:30

8. Stream of Consciousness - TRAIN OF THOUGHT - 12:50

7. Erotomania - AWAKE - 6:44

6. Scene Seven: The Dance of Eternity - SCENES FROM A MEMORY - 6:13

5. Octavarium - OCTAVARIUM - 23:59 (Part II, Part III)

4. Metropolis, Part I: The Miracle And The Sleeper - IMAGES AND WORDS - 9:34

3. Endless Sacrifice - TRAIN OF THOUGHT - 11:28

2. The Glass Prison - SIX DEGREES OF INNER TURBULENCE - 13:52

1. Pull Me Under - IMAGES AND WORDS - 8:15

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Total Playing Time:  111:30

HONORABLE MENTIONS:  Strange Deja Vu (Scenes From A Memory), Surrounded (Images and Words), As I Am (Train of Thought)

Add the honorable mentions to the list and you get a total playing time of 130:01 which would make for a nice 2CD set!  For me, Dream Theater’s recent stuff hasn’t been very good.  Their last two albums have had some good tracks and some disappointing tracks.  Lyrics have never been DT’s strength but at least up until Train of Thought, they were pretty decent.  Hell, on Images and Words and Scenes From A Memory, they were really good.  I hope they pick up the slack on the next record.

So, I’ve been here almost three days now.  Nice place.  Covers a ginormous area.  The weather is colder than in NYC and it has been raining intermittently.  Yesterday, we were able to locate “Fall Creek” - famous for a high suicide rate.  Let me make one thing clear: Cornell and Ithaca are gorgeous (or gorges - same thing).  But they are also far away from any large town/city, so things can get boring fast.  As an undergraduate user of the Cornell Nanoscale Facility, I am not allowed in except during 8AM - 6PM.  This has restricted what I can do and when.  Training took more or less all of Monday and Tuesday but I got the ball rolling on my processing today.  I’m hoping the first stage will be done tomorrow morning and then I can do the second stage in the afternoon.  The final stage will probably have to be done by the graduate student I work with since I won’t able to get into or stay inside the facility after 6PM.  We have to get out of Ithaca on Thursday night or early Friday morning.  I’m hoping that I don’t have to return for some small processing.

Also, once I get back, I’ll upload all the pictures I’m taking here.

Metallica is a band everyone loves to hate after the whole Napster debacle in the early 2000s.  To make matters worse, Metallica’s studio efforts since The Black Album have been disappointing.  S&M was an interesting take on the band’s music while Garage, Inc. was a superb album full of great covers.  But Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger were utter garbage save a handful of tracks.  But these decent tracks never quite reached the lofty heights of the band’s heyday.  Here’s hoping that their new album, Death Magnetic (releasing in September), is a return to form.  So, let’s not forget that Metallica produced some great music in the 80s - assuming that you like metal.  All songs are available on YouTube so go ahead and click the song titles to play them on YouTube!

10. Orion - MASTER OF PUPPETS - 8:27

9. The Call of Ktulu - RIDE THE LIGHTNING - 8:55

8. Ride The Lightning - RIDE THE LIGHTNING - 6:41

7. Creeping Death - RIDE THE LIGHTNING - 6:35

6. Battery - MASTER OF PUPPETS - 5:12

5. Fuel - RELOAD - 4:29

4. Turn The Page - GARAGE, INC. - 6:06

3. Fade to Black - RIDE THE LIGHTNING - 6:59

2. Enter Sandman - THE BLACK ALBUM - 5:31

1. Master of Puppets - MASTER OF PUPPETS - 8:35

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Total Playing Time: 68:30

Honorable Mentions:  Seek & Destroy (Kill ‘Em All), No Leaf Clover (S&M), …And Justice For All (…And Justice For All)

To say that this list confirms Ride The Lightning and Master of Puppets as my favorite Metallica albums would be an understatement.  7 out of the top 10 come from those two albums.  I was tempted to fill in the entire list with tracks from those albums, only leaving room for Enter Sandman.  However, sanity prevailed.

Again, this list will fit on to a standard CD, even the 74-minute variety. I promise that the next one will need two discs! For now, I need to prep for trip to Cornell.

Wow, I’ve been promising a new theme for far too long now.  Unfortunately, it’s going to take some more time.  I’m somewhat busy right now and next week I’ll be off to Cornell to use their nanoscale facility to pattern a silicon wafer.  The biggest hold-up right now is the header image.  I have a few different ideas but I keep jumping around from to another and am having a hard time settling on one.  I’ve abandoned my initial plans for how I wanted to modify my theme - it will now center around the colors defined in whatever header image I choose to use.

Also, I just updated to Wordpress 2.6 and it seems to be running fine.  I really love the Gears support and the ability to preview a theme within the admin dashboard before applying it.  I’ve always been frustrated by having to apply a theme in order to see how it will look on my blog.  If WP2.6 causes any problems on this site, let me know.

I’ll have another 10-Song-Playlist up before I leave for Cornell.  Haven’t finalized the artist, but I have 3 drafts in progress!

Usually, when a band has been around for over 15 years, the sheer volume of music they’ve produced can be quite overwhelming.  Of course, Tool are the exception rather than the rule with a meager 4 studio albums since 1992, but thankfully, Porcupine Tree have released enough material to keep fans occupied for ages.  Even better is the fact that I have favorites that span as far back as their first album that came out in 1992.  However, since I hadn’t the slightest clue on what a Porcupine Tree was back in 1992, I’m partial to the more recent stuff.  Also new to this list: links to full songs on Last.fm or YouTube where available. Just click the song name.

10. Lightbulb Sun - LIGHTBULB SUN - 5:33

9. Drown With Me - IN ABSENTIA (BONUS TRACK) - 5:22

8. Radioactive Toy - ON THE SUNDAY OF LIFE/STARS DIE - 10:10

7. Dark Matter - SIGNIFY/STARS DIE - 8:52

6. Arriving Somewhere But Not Here - DEADWING - 12:02

5. Anesthetize - FEAR OF A BLANK PLANET - 17:43

4. Trains - IN ABSENTIA - 5:56

3. Piano Lessons - STUPID DREAM - 4:22

2. The Sound of Muzak - IN ABSENTIA - 4:59

1. Blackest Eyes - IN ABSENTIA - 4:23

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Total Playing Time: 79:22

Honorable Mentions: The Start of Something Beautiful (Deadwing), Even Less, A Smart Kid (Stupid Dream)

This list betrays my affection for In Absentia and Stupid Dream.  While I think those are two of the best albums that PT has put out, Deadwing and FoaBP come pretty damn close.  As opposed to the Tool playlist, this one will actually fit on an 80-minute CD since I chose Lightbulb Sun as #10 over Even Less.  Rest assured, I didn’t do it intentionally.  I only counted up the playing time after I had settled on the top 10.  By some weird coincidence, the four tracks that exceed the 8-minute mark are all bunched together in between the shorter ones.  That leads me to the reason I love PT so damn much - they can do long, proggy tracks and shorter, poppy/radio-friendly tracks with equal ease.  Steven Wilson’s production is the sweet icing on the delicious cake that is the skillful instrumentation.  I feel this list is a diverse mix - you have the more acoustical ones like Trains and Drown With Me but you also get the hard rockers in Blackest Eyes, Anesthetize (middle section), and Arriving Somewhere But Not Here (second half).

This list was at once easy and difficult to compile.  On the one hand, I’m highly attracted to a good bunch of the top ten which made it easy to come up with the first 6-7 tracks on the list.  On the other hand, it was incredibly difficult to complete the list and organize it after #1.  Tracks such as Strip The Soul, Fadeaway, Nine Cats, Sever, Mother and Child Divided, Buying New Soul, Synesthesia, Pure Narcotic, and Way Out Of Here were all very close to making the top 10 (+3).  Anyone looking to expand beyond the “official” list, should try out the songs I just mentioned.