I’ve been giv­ing Train of Thought a fair chance, and now I can’t stop lis­ten­ing to it. I’m thor­ough­ly impressed. They’ve real­ly devel­oped as a band, and are def­i­nite­ly more con­fi­dent as com­posers. They can stick to their key sig­na­tures with more cre­ativ­i­ty now, and I’m glad that almost every song is giv­en the time to devel­op all the motifs that they intro­duce (most are over 10 min­utes long). There’s only one song that sounds like filler, because it uses a lot of the same lit­tle tricks from oth­er albums, such as Portnoy’s exact syn­co­pat­ed snare roll from Scenes From a Memory or oth­er such riffs. The lyrics remain a tad sim­ple though; these guys are def­i­nite­ly music majors and not English majors.