Schild's Ladder; or, An Informal Prog Metal Review

I've been listening to a lot of old music this year. No, not old necessarily. Rather, music from different periods of my past. Firs this began when I hooked up my oldest functional hard drive, a 1TB external HDD which I bought at the end of high school and used into college. On it was a lot of music that dominated my life over about 5 years - prog metal in particular. For fun I put some on, probably starting with Ayreon: The Human Equation, Into The Electric Castle, and The Universal Migrator albums. I was genuinely surprised how well many of my favorites held up. The low points, I'll say, were often even more cringe than I realized. Ayreon suffers from particularly weak lyrics at times. But then I put on 0101101 because I kept hearing bits of it in my mind. And honestly, I still feel like it's one of my favorite albums. Top 100 I'm sure. Musically it's a masterwork, and while it holds some of Lucassen's biggest whiffs lyrically (Connect the Dots today sounds to me exactly like an I…