I loved it. Buy it. Buy it for Jordan. Buy it for John Petrucci, Steve Morse, Greg Bissonette, Terry Bozzio, and the rest of an impressive lineup of guests. Mr. Rudess has once again delivered a message to us all... He is the God of Prog Keys. And a damn fine songwriter, too... which comes as a surprise to those who only know his writing from the little Dream Theater solo circus acts he occasionally performs live with a comparatively cheesy sequencer backdrop.

Low points are over with early. Track 2, "Dreaming In Titanium," is an eleven minute hurricane, but it starts out a bit heavy-handed (haw!) with an unapologetically Tesh-ific Olympic opening ceremony overture. Still, it pays off with a 300 mile-per-hour upward spiral in the last thirty seconds. So even the low points eventually astound.

To the storm of Track 2, Track 3 is a dubious eye. A nice, soft little soundscape, but with a bit of solo ruination toward the end. Sherinian does this a lot, too... take a perfectly good atmosphere and pee all over it with a 3-billion-note would-be "signature solo," using the same old sound they always use.

But Jordan's got world-class CLASS, and I almost wonder if Magna Carta encouraged him to "put in more solos" to appease his fans. A lot of stuffy types tout Jordan's best strengths being of or pertaining to classical piano (and there are a slew of great piano moments herein), but this site isn't called the House of Mozart, and you're probably at least equally interested in the "balls and chunk" aspect. Keyboard-themed albums that can deliver that at all, let alone successfully, are rare, and this album is very, very rare.

It's interesting to note that with so many of the guitar legends' solo outings experimenting with techno (Morse and Satriani, et al), it is almost conspicuously missing in this, of all things, a KEYBOARDIST'S solo album. Make no mistake, this progger is not interested in making club-worthy synth music, and not even in using a floor-thumping backbone every so often. I'm a prog keyboard player myself, and on my albums I'll break into a steady 4/4 every so often to give the listener's brain a break, and let him use his head for banging instead of thinking. Jordan doesn't kowtow to that kind of baseness, ever. His circus doesn't have clowns or animals; it's all dedicated to the freakshow.

Another notable hole is the absence of Rod Morgenstein on skins... not one track. Clearly, Jordan wanted to make this album a departure from his Rudess/Morgenstein project of days gone by.

Bottom line. As much as I love Derek Sherinian's Planet X, this disc takes everything Derek wanted to do and centuplicated it. But we already knew who kicks whose ass here... it was never a contest.

Shred Pick: "Crack The Meter"

Shred - 10
Production - 9
Vibe - 8
Songwriting - 9
Overall Rating - 9