The Sophomore Bump: Four all time great 2nd albums

If you’re a follower of the Spin It Or Bin It podcast, you know that Paul and I have just started talking about the mighty Van Halen’s discography. One thing we got into was the dichotomy between Van Halen I’s status as an all time great debut album and Van Halen II as more of a sophomore slump. I know this might be a bit of a controversial opinion as, at least from my impression growing up, I and II were often paired together as albums of somewhat equal weight, but Paul and I agreed that II is a significantly weaker album overall. You can listen to the episode to hear us has that out in more detail.

The discussion did make me think, though, what is the opposite of a sophomore slump? Not only which second albums are great - that’s a fairly easy question, but I wanted to look at second albums that come off of a fairly weak debut. So, no, I will not be talking about Weezer today, but I did cover them in a recent post!

• Dream Theater - Images & Words

This has to be the gold standard. Dream Theater’s classic album came off of a pretty turbulent early period for the band. Dream Theater sets their formation year at 1985, under the name Majesty. They went through a phase of demoing and live performances in New England before changing the name to Dream Theater and bringing on the older vocalist Charlie Dominici. The debut album, When Dream and Day Unite was released in 1989 under a small label that seemingly ran out of money before they were able to properly tour and promote the album. No singles, no music videos, no major touring. Just about any other band would be dead on arrival, but somehow Dream Theater persisted for the next three years despite being both signed and unable to tour or record. Eventually, the band was given a second crack at a record contract, this time through the far more wealthy and reputable Atco Records, and the rest is history.

Before digging into I&W, I do want to throw a bone to the 80s era of Dream Theater. When Dream and Day Unite isn’t a bad album, especially if you put yourself in that late 80s period when Metal was dominated bysurface level glam bands and many of the greats from earlier in the decade were either in decline or defunct. The early Dream Theater not only brings sophistication back to metal (obviously), but a little bit of the grit and ferocity that you won’t find on a Winger album. I actually think both the When Dream and Day Unite demos and Majesty demos, both officially released through YtseJam records, are worth hearing.

As far as Images & Words, though, this is an album that occupies a really strange place in retrospect. This is Dream Theater’s closest brush with mainstream success in the classic sense of the word. Pull Me Under was a big MTV hit and they even had FM radio airplay. This album also held a unique status in the sense that, in addition to being a hit album, many of the hardcore fans seemed to agree that it was arguably their best work as well. Despite all of that, the band only made one more album with this lineup and then were placed in a period of turmoil again and spent most of the 90s in the wilderness (despite a hardcore cult following sustaining them). It wasn’t until Scenes From a Memory and the introduction of keyboardist Jordan Rudess that the classic Dream Theater lineup and sound was solidified. Indeed, 25 years later, the band celebrated the reunion with Mike Portnoy with a show that heavily focused on Scenes From a Memory and commemorated that particular lineup of the band. Kevin Moore, despite penning the lyrics to Pull Me Under and being a major contributor to the band’s early success, almost seems to occupy more of a footnote in DT’s history.

With all of this in mind, Images & Words is quite different from the rest of Dream Theater’s discography. The Petrucci/Rudess/Portnoy writing team (as well as the Petrucci/Rudess writing team that held down the fort during Portnoy’s absence in the 10s) established a pretty identifiable Dream Theater sound. Sure some of that is present on Images & Words, but that album has a slicker polish to it as well and slightly less emphasis on instrumental acrobatics comparatively. The epics are there, but the keyboard/guitar duals are not quite as defined. The triggered drums give the album a much less “live” feel than their later work, and Kevin Moore comes in with a much more traditional and less virtuosic keyboard styling than Rudess. I also have to wonder, nearly 35 years later and now that the band is reportedly working on their 17th studio album, if there are younger generations of fans who identify more with the 00s era of Dream Theater or even the Mangini era than with Images & Words. It’s still a great album though and I definitely think the case is there for it being the best they ever did.

• Symphony X - Damnation Game

In addition to already drawing a lot of comparisons with Dream Theater, and no doubt propelled by the wave of progressive metal in the 90s spurred by DT, Symphony X’s early history is somewhat similar. The first album is largely forgotten by the band, was essentially self released, and features a different vocalist. Sadly, unlike When Dream and Day Unite, I find there is very little on the self titled Symphony X album to go back to. And unlike Images & Words, Damnation Game is still a fairly obscure album in the Symphony X oeuvre. There also was just a lot less upheaval and internal turmoil going into Symphony X’s second album. They were still on a small label, did not have major representation (at least in the USA), and the turnaround time was pretty quick with this album coming out a year after the debut.

I happen to think this is a very underrated album though and while maybe not their best, I think you can make a pretty strong case for this album over the rest of their pre-Odyssey work. In particular, I really enjoy the blend of harpsichord and guitar that seems to dominate much of this album before they switched to more standard prog synthesizer sounds. I also like that Russell Allen leans more into a Steve Walsh style melodic vocal sound - he would go on to add more grit to his voice with each subsequent album. But what it comes down to overall is this album contains a lot of variety and really no filler. The one-two punch of the title track into Dressed to Kill is as good as anything else on a Symphony X album, the ballad On the Edge of Forever is a worthy prelude to what they would explore on the Accolade duo, and songs like Secrets and Whispers contain a level of riffing and melodicism respectively that I find to be largely absent from their later work. This is a band still finding themselves and I would argue that only Twilight in Olympus rivals this album in terms of the level of variety and willingness to experiment.¹

Symphony X has a funny discography. The run from Damnation Game up to V: The New Mythology Suite feels largely interchangeable and the band quickly settles into a style. The conventional choice from this period is The Divine Wings of Tragedy, and while I would concede that nothing on Damnation Game has the scope of that album’s title track, I would also argue that there are a few forgettable moments on Wings that gives the album a bit of bloat that is also absent on Damnation Game. Once you hit The Odyssey, the band is in completely different territory. I don’t think the band had come close to the level of achievement on The Odyssey up until that point, and they certainly haven’t since then. But they also became much different sounding and, sadly, much less prolific.

• Genesis - Trespass
  You can probably put Trespass less in the Images & Words tier of GOATed albums and more in the Damnation Game tier of huge steps up from the debut, but not reasonably in the conversation for that band’s best album. Much like Damnation Game, I think this album has been unfairly forgotten and stands as a curio that should be heard by more people who like Genesis but haven’t done a full discography deep dive. The biggest reason this album seems to be glossed over is the absence of Phil Collins and Steve Hackett, but the bones of what this defines this band are still present, which speaks to how core the creative partnership of Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, and (most of all) Tony Banks was to Genesis’ sound. You can even understand why Banks/Rutherford were confident that they could keep Genesis alive even after Phil Collins, and maybe during a more favorable time in pop music they may have been right.

I am also going to use this as an opportunity for today’s hottest take, which is that on balance I prefer Trespass to the what seems to be treated as Genesis’ de facto debut, Nursery Cryme. I think the production is smoother, and while Trespass doesn’t have a Musical Box, I would argue that Nursery Cryme is a fairly scattered album that is propped up by an immense opening track, while Trespass is a much more complete experience with very little filler. The most remembered song is obviously The Knife, but I’ll happily listen to anything off this album. The Knife is certainly an interesting prelude to a lot of what they would do later on Nursery Cryme, but I’m not even sure it’s my favorite song on the album. I want to draw particular attention to White Mountain, which has a fantastic Gabriel lyric and also just has all of the trappings of classic Genesis in general. The 12 string guitars, the classical tinged keys, flutes, it’s all there. The lyrical content on this album is also a little more grounded than the next pair of Genesis albums, Looking For Someone in particular stands out for Gabriel’s Lennon-esque lyricism. There’s definitely a bit of a transitional sound going from their debut to the next album, but I believe Trespass would have been seen as more of an achievement if Genesis hadn’t gone on to completely revolutionize rock music many times over.

• Iced Earth - Night of the Stormrider
  Stormrider is a really odd one. The first Iced Earth album is yet another glorified demo that has largely been forgotten by the fanbase and includes a performance from a vocalist who would immediately depart from the band. But then the follow-up Night of the Stormrider also features a vocalist who would immediately depart from the band, before Iced Earth finally finds their Bruce Dickinson in Matt Barlow (who would also go on to be replaced twice). Despite the absence of Barlow and the demo level recording quality, somehow Night of the Stormrider reaches musical heights that Iced Earth arguably never reached again.

Never mind the tumultuous last 6 years for Jon Schaffer, it had already long been frustrating to be a fan of Iced Earth. The three albums released with Stu Block had varying levels of quality but overall felt like a band that was running on autopilot and desperate to recapture the glory days. Before the Stu era you had the extremely underwhelming reunion album with Barlow and a period with the perennial replacement singer Ripper Owens that resulted in a couple bloated and overly ambitious flops. That leaves 2002’s Horror Show as the last truly successful Iced Earth album.

But even within that classic Barlow period, my biggest problem with Iced Earth was how polished and bland their material started to become. Their music quickly got formulaic and the glossy production style seemed to cut all of the edges off. In fact, Burnt Offerings is the only Iced Earth album with Barlow on vocals that I find has a satisfying enough level of ferocity. I like the songs on Something Wicked This Way Comes, for example, but something about that album just feels a little too clean. And then the previous album, their breakthrough and beloved Dark Saga, has quite a bit of filler that unexplicably gets a pass from most of the fanbase. I like these albums, but they aren’t go to’s for me mostly because of the production.

With that in mind, Night of the Stormrider pretty much hits every mark for me. The raw production preserves the band’s edge and energy. The riffs are immense. The album is conceptual in the same way as much of Iced Earth’s later work, but the concept never comes at the expense of the music² The interludes that show up throughout the album are actually very effective and the album creates an immersive world that they ironically failed to achieve on later more conceptual albums. For my money, this is a 10/10 no skips album and an American thrash/power metal classic. Aside from the two interlude tracks, every song on here is top notch, including the oft forgotten Mystical End. Of course the album highlights have to be Pure Evil and Travel in Stygian. Iced Earth wore their Maiden influences on their sleeves, and they came remarkably close to Harris level epicness on this album.

So the elephant in the room to address with this album is the absence of Matt Barlow. I don’t mind John Greely’s vocals probably because I’ve just grown used to his singing on this album over the years, but I am fully aware that this album would be greatly improved with Barlow’s singing. And, in fact, you can hear most of this album with Barlow singing on the seminal Alive in Athens³, another GOATed album that probably belongs on a live metal album Mount Rushmore. There’s no denying it, the Alive in Athens performance of each Stormrider song represented on this live album is the definitive version, and the only actual song not represented on this album is Mystical End. So it’s an odd one, because I fully acknowledge there are better versions of all these songs. But with that being said, what Alive in Athens doesn’t have is the sequencing and immersive flow that comes with a concept album. That alone makes the original version of Night of the Stormrider worth going back to.

Footnotes

1. To further belabor the Dream Theater comparisons, one of many elements that has held Symphony X back from DT levels of success is just that DT works with a much wider palette. When you consider the range of styles from Another Day to This Dying Soul to Blind Faith to Trail of Tears, for better or worse DT has always been more willing to try different things with their sound. Symphony X for the most part sticks to a formula. ↩

2. This pretty much cannot be said of any of the other Iced Earth albums save for Horror Show and maybe The Glorious Burden (huge asterisk on that one). ↩

3. In addition to providing improved versions of songs off the first three albums, Alive in Athens solves the overly polished problem of the later Iced Earth albums and gives a much more listenable version of those songs for me. Alive in Athens is my favorite Iced Earth album and if it weren’t for the follow-up Horror Show, this would be the only Iced Earth album you need. ↩