Album of the Day

Images and Words, by Dream Theater (1992): One of the quirks of the A-Z trip through my CD collection is that I encounter huge chunks of discs by one band. The first one up is Dream Theater, which occupied my entire day today. In fact, the run of albums today(Images and Words, Live at the Marquee, Awake, A Change of Seasons, Falling Into Infinity, and Once in a LIVETime) are pretty much the high point of the band's career, in my opinion. Things started to fall down after LIVETime (well, after Falling, really, given James LaBrie's horrible screeching on the live album). But these albums really show the band's prog-metal talent. Images and Words, of course, is not only the album that put the band on the map but, as Brandon puts it in his Ground and Sky review, "this is the album that put prog-metal on the map."