Your last sentence is interesting to me. I’m kind of two minds about lists like these. Should the writer go all in on their personal preference, or strive for some objectivity and select what is the best album despite a personal preference? Is there even a difference, or is the latter approach being disingenuous?

Stephen Thomas Erlewine is a great critic and I’ve been reading his work on AllMusic.com for decades. But it’s really strange to me that he went with The Dreaming here.

Exactly. I like all of her albums including The Dreaming, but it takes too much work and doesn’t offer as much reward as many of her other albums- it often feels strange for strangeness sake.

Hounds Of Love streamlines and synthesizes the eccentricities of The Dreaming, making them more immediate but no less potent.

I never will.

I agree. Sometimes I think they made that random announcement that Phase 4 had ended and they were moving onto Phase 5 to do some damage control, since the threads weren’t coming together because of the pandemic and it was taking so long.

It feels like he wants to milk the Fox version of the characters (like Patrick Stewart’s cameo in Multiverse and Hugh Jackman coming up in Deadpool 3) before moving on to new versions.

I haven’t seen What If,  Ms. Marvel, She Hulk, or Secret Invasion, and have no plans to. I’ll let you know how The Marvels and the next Captain America movie turn out for me.

Exactly. Thank you.

Eh. I saw the first Avengers movie having skipped Thor and Captain America. I was fine.

I think I could’ve chalked that up to all the stronger inter-relationships between all the characters that happened off-screen. Nebula was quite friendly with everyone but especially Peter, Drax and Mantis had forged a very strong relationship, everyone was acting more familial and emotional regarding Rocket’s fate.

I love their bass sound on their first two albums.  “Planet Earth” is amazing. 

The distance between the years sure does shrink as you get older, huh? My wife has forbidden me from informing her anymore how old the stuff we used to watch is.

I understand feeling like HLTW is overplayed and souring on it, but there’s no way a list of Duran Duran’s best work could present itself seriously without having that song ranked, let alone not in the top 5.

I have always loved The Kids are Alright. Formative watching in developing my love of The Who.

When I found out he basically wanted to redo “A Piece of the Action” it made more sense but also felt less special. I would’ve been really interested in seeing his take on science fiction, but working with that episode put it back into his usual wheelhouse.  

I have been having a blast with F-Zero 99. (For reference, I played but never got into the original SNES game, but I adored F-Zero X for the N64. Never played any other version.)

At this point and about 3 different Star Wars continuities later, I sometimes think I prefer the often ridiculous, frequently bad, but usually fun pulpy thrills of the original Marvel Comics Star Wars stories.

When I finally got around to Tonight, I was surprised how not bad it was. Not classic, for sure, but there was some okay stuff on there. I liked his duet with Tina Turner on the title track.

I like Cheap Trick plenty, so I wouldn’t go that far. All their albums are flawed, but I’d miss a lot of my favorite songs if I limited myself to At Budokhan or even a greatest hits.