Asia: John Wetton or John Payne era?
 

I'm only offering options to vote for one or the other, or that you have no preference: if you don't care about Asia then don't vote and nobody's forcing you to contribute. I know a lot of people hate this band and that's fine, but for those who credit them, which lineup do you prefer? To remind anyone who doesn't know, and wants to, here's how it stacks up:

John Wetton

1982-1990 then 2008-2014
Asia, Alpha, Astra, Then and Now
Phoenix, Omega, XXX, Gravitas

John Payne

1992-2004
Aqua, Aria, Arena, Aura, Silent Nation

I personally love Wetton's voice (love both of them) but I feel Asia really released their best work under Payne's leadership. Aqua, Aria, Arena and Aura are among my favourite Asia albums, and while I do rate the debut highly and like Alpha, I recognise that the latter is mostly a collection of banal love songs, whereas with later albums they got into deeper, more interesting topics. Their music also got tighter, I feel, with the addition of Al Pitrelli and later Elliot Randall on guitar, and Payne definitely added a new dimension to their songwriting, which had, up to the release of Astra, I feel, become quite stale.

Lol. It says Batlord is a cuck on 10 pages. I'm starting to think Batlord is a cuck.

Pretty sure you have to have a bitch on lock to be a cuck.

Ladies & Gentlemen, the first cuck without a bitch on lock.

Ain't no durn negros touching my woman, I tell you watt.

Have your cuck discussion elsewhere, you ****s.

Suck my cuck.

It's amazing a band could have Steve Howe and still be so bad. The vocals and their desperate attempts at melody are ****ing cringeworthy. They went from very bad to horrible so I'll go with the original loser.