)
Yes, The X Factor is definitely one of my favourite albums ever released. It's partly because I was a new Maiden fan when it got out and I never had a problem with Bruce's leaving, so I was less critical of it than most other fans who hated Blaze in the first place. I must have played that cassette thousands of times. The interesting thing is that my appreciation for the album over the years has only grown and I absolutely love every song on it, including the widely disregarded Look For the Truth, which happens to be among my favourites. However, the first time Maiden came to my country was in 1998 and I couldn't be there for various reasons but I listened to the gig outside the venue.
As for AMOLAD, I still think it's the most consistent Maiden album, without a single filler, and I love it. I saw the AMOLAD tour in 2007 (my first Maiden gig) but they played five AMOLAD songs then. I wish I had seen them all.
Iron Maiden - AMOLAD, Powerslave, FotD, BNW, The X Factor (TFF was nearly included, but I hate Satellite)
Dream Theater - Systematic Chaos, Train of Thought, Octavarium, BC&SL (though I'm very tempted to add Falling into Infinity to this list)
Black Sabbath - Sabotage, Master of Reality, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Heaven and Hell
Bruce Dickinson - The Chemical Wedding, Accident of Birth (Toltec 7 Arrival is just an intro, right?)
Pink Floyd - Animals, Wish You Were Here
Rush - A Farewell to Kings, Clockwork Angels
Death - Symbolic, The Sound of Perseverance
Joe Satriani - Surfing with the Alien (Shockwave Supernova seems tobe slowly heading this way, too)
Opeth - Ghost Reveries
Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak
Judas Priest - Painkiller
Symphony X - Underworld
Rainbow - Ritchie Blackmore's Rainbow
Alice in Chains - Dirt (if you don't consider Iron Gland a song, which you shouldn't)
Deep Purple - In Rock
Gentle Giant - Octopus
(Jethro Tull - Thick as a Brick and Passion Play
I consider Satellite an intro not a song to itself. The fact that it is the same track number as the title track (on the studio LP) shows Maiden might feel the same so IMO, go ahead and put TFF on that list.
Will edit later.
Actually, I'm not too keen on Powerslave at all. Apart from Aces High and Rime, I don't consider any of the rest among Maiden's best, even the universally acclaimed title track.
To me "good" is pretty middle-of-the-road in the description of anything. I don't use ratings out-of-ten for my music, I just use WMP's five-star system. Anything four or five star with this system pretty much equates to 7, 8, 9, or 10 out of ten i.e. "good" for the purposes of this thread. For artists I enjoy listening too, I don't really have a massive amount of three-star tracks (5-6/10; that's pretty "meh" for an artist I dig); even fewer two-star tracks (3-4/10; that's incredible disappointing &/or positively annoying); and one-star (1-2/10) is, for me, unlistenable (why would I even have this music?). So in this context, pretty much everything Maiden have recorded is near 7/10 or better; therefore nearly their entire discography would qualify here. Plus, I'm not going to sit here typing dozens of Buckethead album titles...
That's not really very much different; still, like, hundreds of albums for me personally. And there's people listing half a dozen in response to this; what's that all about?
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