Interesting take. I don't dislike Black Celebration by any means, but there is that sense of "incompleteness" you allude to. Like I keep waiting for a big song, which never arrives. It's like it peaks with that version of Fly on the Windscreen, and never really approaches that high again. The number of Martin…

I mentioned elsewhere, but I'd say Violator and/or Some Great Reward are those peaks, and agree the Black Celebration is an odd choice. (MFTM has some of their best tracks, but also some filler that I can't ignore.) I personally love SOFAD, but also recognize that the "synth pop" moniker loses relevance with that…

It's odd to me to see Black Celebration as the "essential" Depeche Mode album. Obviously, Violator is where they pretty much perfected everything they'd been doing up until then. And Some Great Reward might be their best "pop" album before then.

I only have their greatest hits, but have always had a soft spot for the band. I saw them not TOO long ago (ok, maybe like 8 years or something), and enjoyed the hell out of it, despite it just being the singer, plus anonymous backup guys.

I liked the joyousness of the Travelling Wilburys song, rather than the wistfulness of the Tom Petty one.

Yeah, this was pretty much the last sitcom on a major network I've been watching. From here, it seems I'll be getting my comedy fix from IFC and Comedy Central…though even Comedy Central's days may be numbered for me.

Yeah, I was kind of disappointed with the whole flash-forward conceit, since the entire last season was already a flash forward. It was fine, but I think overall I would have preferred to see the entire cast together throughout the episode, rather than highlight each character in their own flash forward.

I thought they were hinting that Leslie would become (the first female?) president, and that the last flash forward would confirm that. I was surprised they didn't, but maybe they wanted to leave it ambiguous or not spell everything out. Which is slightly odd, since they spelled pretty much everything else out.

I don't know. Fantasy has always been a sort of bastard genre in terms of film, but the success of LOTR has spawned several attempts at jumping on the bandwagon—to the point that any fantasy movie adapted from a fable or fairy tale looks like another movie in the LOTR franchise. (Narnia, Jack the Giant Slayer,…

It's weird, I remember buying exactly one Shannara book in my youth, and never maintained interest enough to finish it. I've been thinking back on some of the books I loved as a kid (Dragonlance especially). I wonder if I would have any more interest these days.

No mention of Shadowrun? I wasn't particularly a gamer, but that franchise would seem worth mentioning—though maybe it just falls in with D&D. At the time, it seemed like a pretty blatant copy of Blade Runner, only with magic and aliens.

Yeah, "worthless" might be an exaggeration—that Sinead O'Connor track is pretty good, too. But it's mostly about the U2 and Annie Lennox songs for me. I remember at the time, after seeing the video for their song, thinking that U2's new album was called "Red Hot and Blue". And then realizing it was actually a…

Wow, that was really good. Bravo!

Hey, I can't say I agree with you (though the lyrics are cryptic at best, or pure nonsense at worst), but I'm starting to regret that you didn't get to do the full Hatesong piece instead of Rob Corrdry! I love a good, passionate rant. So, kudos!

More notable, I thought, was the fact that he got Herbie Hancock to play keys…and then do absolutely nothing with him. No solo. Nothing fancy. I turned to my gf as we were watching was like, "heck, Ed Sheeran could have saved a bunch of money and just had ME do that!" Other than John Mayer's solo, that seemed the…

This is baffling to me. Can you specify what you hate about it? Do you just hate stuff that's based on Bach pieces?

I'm a bit ashamed at how many of the tracks on Medusa I heard for the first time through that album.

Oh man, yeah. That Red Hot and Blue album is mostly worthless (I love the U2 song on there, though), but that track IS perfection. I still like playing that one on piano.

I always liked Diva and Medusa, and I eventually saw Annie perform shortly before she put out Bare. (She was incredible, of course.) That said, I do kind of get Rob's point. I'm not sure I'd expect someone with his musical background to dig it, with all of the synth pads and stuff. It's also not music I ever go…

Yeah. I literally watched that movie with my ex as we were in the process of breaking up. Somehow, we ended up on a sort of "last date", knowing it was such as we were there, and saw this movie in the theater. It was surreal, and devastating.