Talking Into Infinity – Episode 82 – Loudwire’s Big 4 of Prog Top Albums – 54 Album Ranking!

We’re getting back into the cage for this special non-DT episode of TII! This time, we’re pitting two of the greatest metal albums ever recorded head to head – a pair of Metallica classics! It’s 1986’s Master of Puppets against 1988’s …And Justice For All! Yes, it’s sad but true… we have to pick a winner… (see what we did there?)

We’re back with Part 2 of our Dream Theater album rankings – this time we’re hitting the top halves of our lists as we rank albums 7 through 1! The bottom halves of our lists had some controversial selections – will the top halves be more of the same? It’s time to find out!

Well, we’ve put it off long enough… it’s time to strap our helmets on and go to work. We’re ranking the 15 Dream Theater studio albums in our own personal worst-to-first lists! This is a labor of love and it’ll hurt placing some albums where they’ll eventually be ranked, but it’s gotta be done and let’s face it – DT is like pizza. Even when it isn’t our favorite, it’s still excellent! On this episode we're ranking numbers 15 through 8!

Loudwire recently released a top albums list that only contains records by the Big Four of prog metal… Queensryche, Opeth, Between the Buried and Me and of course – Dream Theater! We’re going through the list and giving our thoughts on all of their choices… the good, the bad, and the ugly!

DT has finally announced the first leg of their long-awaited reunion tour with Mike Portnoy, beginning with dates over in Europe! We have some thoughts on choosing Europe as the first destination, but we got to thinking… can we guess what their setlist might look like? We take OUR stab at seeing if we can read the band’s minds and play a little game of Guess The Setlist!

It’s our fourth installment of ranking the songs on a Dream Theater record, and this time – as always, at random – we’ve been tasked with Systematic Chaos! It’s one of the most eclectic records in the band’s catalog and Brian and Jon can’t agree on whether or not In The Presence of Enemies needs to be considered as separate tracks – but how do these songs rate when pitted against each other?

Brian recently returned from the Monsters of Rock cruise and had a thought... if we could each book our own "dream cruise" with Dream Theater headlining, what bands would we choose to open for the mighty DT? Also, Brian tells us all about his experience on the MOR cruise - and Jon details more TouchTunes DT-related shenanigans!

Brian is on the Monsters of Rock Cruise, so Jon brings on personal friend – and friend of show – Joseph Wren (discussmetaljoe in the chat!) to, well… just bullshit about Dream Theater for an hour-plus! From The Astonishing to the Portnoy/Mangini debate to fans being jerks to each other for no reason… this episode is basically a bunch of DT fans hanging out and shooting the shit together – driven by a LOT of incredible points brought up by our listeners/viewers!

It’s the next entry in our series of “you can’t have DT”, so… it’s 2002 and you walk into the record store to buy Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence… and the clerk tells you that you CAN’T buy it! You HAVE to choose something else… what records are you grabbing? We give OUR choices for what we’d buy when we can’t have what we really want – the new Dream Theater record! – along with special guest cohost Chris Akin from The Classic Metal Show!

Jon here. Full disclosure - this is NOT a normal episode. My dad passed suddenly and we went online to announce that there wouldn't be a show tonight - but instead ended up talking about my memories of my dad for over an hour. From music to golf to humor, this is the most raw episode of TII we've ever done. To any of you who listen to the whole thing - thanks SO much for doing so.