Re: dream theater
I have friends who like this band. I have discussed reasons why they are not much fun to listen to ad nauseum. Here are 4:
1) They don't write songs. They write excercises for their instruments. Great fun for them, but not much fun for the listener. They get away with this by saying pretentious things like "we have written twelve suites for our new album". Prog fans eat this up.
2) The keyboard solos just sound really really awful for some reason.
3) I once listened to the whole of "6 degrees of inner turbulence" The self righteous, lyrics about alcoholism and stem cell research made me extremely angry. According to one description it is "non-partisan". There is no such thing. It sounds like standard, conservative, pro-life nonsense to me. There are other songs with ultra self-righteous lyrics too, but I don't know titles.
4) Because Sikth do (did) the same thing about a million times better, without the horrible keyboard sound, without the irritating lyrics, with the added advantage that what they came up with were actually recognisable as songs.