Be cool or be cast out

We're not talking about the Royals again until Mark Teahen and Billy Butler and Alex Gordon hit their next home runs, and the Royals score at least seven runs in a game.

(Go Greinke!)

So, what's your favorite Rush album?

Let's break this down into three periods:

The seventies -- Caress of Steel (1975), Fly By Night (1975), 2112 (1976), A Farewell to Kings (1977), Hemispheres (1978), Permanent Waves (1980).

The eighties -- Moving Pictures (1981), Signals (1982), Grace Under Pressure (1984), Power Windows (1985), Hold Your Fire (1987), Presto (1989).

The nineties -- Roll The Bones (1992) and all of the crap after that.

Rush jumped the shark with Roll the Bones, which had one good song (Bravado). We don't like any of the albums after they rolled the coach.

We like to be contrarians, but we can't go against the collective will of former pot heads everywhere and pick any album but 2112 as our favorite concept album.

In a decade that is known for bad music, Rush produced some amazing albums in the eighties. Our favorites bookend the decade perfectly, Moving Pictures and Presto. Two songs on Moving Pictures are Rush at the height of their powers, "Red Barchetta" and "Camera Eye." We like Presto because it is the last album in which the band is engineering complex Rush materpieces, and they're doing it with significant independent maturity. After that, they started responding awkwardly to other musical trends. Go listen to "The Pass" and tell us that's not a good song.

So what's your favorite Rush album? Song?

What's your favorite album cover of all time, Rush and/or other? (We're talking about record album cover art here.)

P.S. Shakespeare quote of the day: "I'll so offend to make offense a skill, redeeming time when men think least I will."