Dream Theater

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Scenes From a Memory is the best DT album. As Portnoy himself said, it has great songs, great concept, great production, great sound effects etc. Many people would tell you that Images and Words is their best album but they’re lying (a little bit). I&W already displayed great virtuosity and songwriting but the DT style hadn’t fully matured yet. Awake is a development of that style in a darker, heavier direction.

Scenes From a Memory - best overall album, amazing sound and mood throughout.
Awake - catchy heavy awesomeness.
Train of Thought - catchy heavy awesomeness 9 years later.
Images and Words - youthful energy to the max.
Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence - long and dramatic, somewhat experimental.
A Dramatic Turn of Events - combining metal with softer musical elements.
Black Clouds and Silver Linings - some of DT’s highest peaks but quite a bit of fluff in between.

All of their albums are worth checking out, there’s really no bad one. The debut album has pretty awful sound but there’s good quality recordings of some of those songs from around 2006. Do check out their latest release as well, it’s like Distance Over Time but better (doesn’t sound as metallic).
 
Agreeing with Saap on the first 2!
I&W is very high up there as well, Octavarium probably .. but after the first 2 I can't really put them in order.
 
Images & Words sounds like The Final Countdown, but the playing, singing and the songs are amazing.
Awake has a more open, almost jazzy production, even though it’s a bit more metal than I&W as well. Great songs, James stretching out, but I prefer I&W because of the songs.
A Change Of Seasons is the best.
Falling Into Infinity is uneven, great stuff like Lines In The Sand, or the first 2 minutes of New Millenium, but has some more commercial stuff I don‘t enjoy so much.
For Scenes From A Memory, Portnoy and Petrucci were the producers for the first time (Kevin Shirley still mixed it), and everybody seems to agree that was a good decision. It‘s their best sounding album up to that point, much more in your face drumming, and heavier guitars as well. I respect the opinion that it‘s their best album, with the concept etc. But the band also doesn’t feel so much like a unit anymore, I prefer both Derek‘s and Kevin‘s styles/sounds to Jordan’s, and I lost a lot of interest in the band after that. So I prefer the earlier stuff.
 
Falling Into Infinity is so underrated.
Always loved the album and crystal clear production of Shirley. Peruvian Skies and Trial Of Tears are among my favourite DT songs too.
I prefer the earlier stuff too, the most recent loved album is Black Clouds & Silver Linings but don´t care about anything released after that one.
 
MindRuler said:
Falling Into Infinity is so underrated.
Always loved the album and crystal clear production of Shirley. Peruvian Skies and Trial Of Tears are among my favourite DT songs too.
I prefer the earlier stuff too, the most recent loved album is Black Clouds & Silver Linings but don´t care about anything released after that one.
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Huh, I didn’t know Falling Into Infinity was produced by Shirley too. It’s funny because I associate FIF with a colder sound while SFAM is warmer and cozier. Trial of Tears is a damn great song.
 
MindRuler said:
Falling Into Infinity is so underrated.
Always loved the album and crystal clear production of Shirley. Peruvian Skies and Trial Of Tears are among my favourite DT songs too.
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Lines in the Sand and Trial of Tears are top tier DT songs for sure. I'm also a big fan of Peruvian Skies, New Millennium, Hollow Years, and Hell's Kitchen. Anna Lee is also a very underrated ballad. The remaining songs do almost nothing for me, though. I wish Raise the Knife would have been on the actual album.
 
Anna Lee and New Millennium are two of my least favorite DT songs. The album as a whole is very inconsistent, although the two epics are fantastic and I always considered Take Away My Pain one of their most underrated songs. I dig Burning My Soul and Just Let Me Breathe a lot too, which seems to be an unpopular opinion.
 
Light Fuse & Get Away, Prophets of War and Raw Dog are some of the band's very worst songs... A Tempting Offer and Viper King are good fits, very underrated. Not sure how much of a deep cut Scarred is when it's a fan favourite and was played live 194 times according to setlist.fm...
 
What a bizarre list. First off, the King Crimson cover isn't even Dream Theater's piece and doesn't fit whatsoever. Then the author reveals that they know little about the Mesozoic era by stating that Light Fuse... is from the band's Jurassic era (it's actually from their Triassic). It's also easily the weakest part of their debut album. Then we move to Never Enough, which is arguably one of the band's absolute low points; a song written by Portnoy about "ungrateful fans" which comes across as whiny, immature, and angsty.

Viper King is a fun bouncy tune that is clear from the get-go why it's a bonus track: it feels nothing like Dream Theater. Raw Dog is far from one of my favorite instrumental compositions by the band, but there's some groovy metal moments that make it worthwhile. In fact, having heard it now for the first time in years, I like much of it (even if it suffers from a bit of atonality for much of its length). That riff at 3:19 is chaotically fun!

Prophets of War is actually a solid track. It's a bit straightforward for my tastes, but it's catchy and I agree with the author's choice here. Also, Raise the Knife is amazing and never should have been left off of Falling Into Infinity - another good pick by the author.

Then there's two tracks that I'm a fan of but don't understand why they're deep cuts - Outcry and Scarred. The former oozes with emotion and the latter is dripping with mood and feel. But these two songs are far from obscure. Finally, nothing from The Astonishing should ever be mentioned on a "best of" list.

Dream Theater is one of the most difficult bands to do a "deep cuts" list about, though, as they don't really have much that's considered a "hit." During the Portnoy years, they would deliberately switch the sets up for each show to play material that the fans in each city hadn't heard the last time. Anything was fair game. It's clear that the band views their entire discography as strong, which is pretty rare.

Edit: Petrucci even talks about it here: https://metalinjection.net/news/john-petrucci-has-a-very-funny-take-on-dream-theaters-obscurity
 
Was going to say the same as DB, Dream Theater doesn’t have deep cuts because they don’t have any super well known songs. They can play whatever they want pretty much. You only start getting “deep cuts” when you look into their non-released tracks. Here are a few that I really like:

Don’t Look Past Me - I saw this live in 2017, hadn’t looked at the Setlist in advance. One of the few times my jaw dropped at a concert (another being Opeth playing a bonus song on the Heritage tour and a few years later playing Era at Red Rocks).

Raise the Knife

Eve
 
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