Nine Lives - I most got over the admission that yeah, their “comeback” era stuff was mostly middling-to-bad sell-out pop music, but re-listening to this was still kind of depressing. Interesting that you think it’s their best sell-out era album, because while I’d always thought that it was better than Get A Grip (which was never a common opinion) I know think that it’s their worst album up to this point. There’s a uniform competency here that is not present on GaG, none of the songs sound tossed off or unfinished to me, but this just sounds like a bland Steven Tyler solo album. I guess it makes sense that someone who doesn’t think Joe Perry was anything special would pick this as their best later album, because aside from his solos this sounds like it could have been any assemblage of session men. It’s not funky at all, and there are alot of fakey synth instruments. I have fuzzy memories of getting this albums when it was new, and I’d really like it to be at least a guilty pleasure, but it’s just limp and boring.
I guess the best songs are the last two. I don’t remember Attitude Adjustment being a radio hit, but it was on the proto-Guitar Hero type game that was on the original release’s CD-Rom along with Falling In Love and Hole In My Soul.

Rainbow - Down To Earth: This album…exists…apparently. Graham Bonnet is technically fine, but he’s my least favorite kind of hard rock singer, at least of this era. Other than that, these songs are all good enough to be in the bottom third of a good 9 song hard rock album. I really don’t even think “Since You Been Gone” is anything special, unless you’ve just been listening to Nine Lives for a week or something. I only listened to this once (that goes for all 4 of these albums, at least this time around).

Nazareth - Nazareth: Wow, I kind of hate this, tbh. Maybe it is, in some musicological sense, “a rather impressive bouquet of 1971 substyles,” but a mix of the ham-handed preformances and ham-handed production makes most of it sound more monotonous to me than a compilation of whatever my picks for the most boring AC/DC songs would be. Morning Dew is at least an interesting failure, and the song before it was an okay change of pace.

Hair of the Dog - Maybe my dislike of that last album can mostly be blamed on the shit production? This has a much more textured production and I find the album reasonably entertaining, even though it doesn’t shoot for as much diversity. I’m not that interested in revisiting it though. The title track has one of the stupidest solos in a deservedly classic song.

I like Nashville Skyline well enough, but it’s my second least favorite of his ’60s albums after The Times…, and I can’t argue with you too much if that’s your take on it.

I would love to weigh in on Sandinista!, but I’ll have to get back to you.

I care about Children of Dune more than any of these albums, but I haven’t read it in 10 years so I don’t have that much to say. I remember being surprised that you liked it after you didn’t like Dune Messiah, let alone that you thought it was the best of the three. It’s good and I’m glad he wrote it, but it’s not necessary the way that I think Messiah was, and it is getting into diminishing returns-territory. I remember it taking me longer to read than the other two combined.
For SF trivia that I care about and you probably don’t, it’s the last Dune novel to appear as a magazine serial before being published as a book.

I’ll get around to Furiosa but I don’t expect to like it. My low expectations are not driven by the fact that you and Norville didn’t like it, they’re driven by my skepticism that, however much I might enjoy the Mad Max Series (albeit not as much as I used to), I can’t imagine that it yielded a movie that deserves to be 147 minutes. I’d be more exited if they’d made two Mad Max movies that were each 73.5 minutes long and released them a year apart, but that’s not the world we live in.