10 Albums, 10 Days: A Look At Ten Albums That Influenced My Musical Tastes
So there's a challenge going around Facebook: 10 Albums, 10 Days. Some say just post the album cover, no explanations; others say add a blurb. I went a little deeper, and figured I'd turn the whole thing into a blog post by the end.
These are in rough chronological order as to when they became an influence on me. The first one's a bit odd, but that's because it went from a sub-conscious to a conscious influence over time. If you ever wanted to find out what makes me tick, this is your ticket:
Level 42 "True Colours" (1984)
I picked this one because it influenced my tastes in music twice: once as a child and again after graduating high school and becoming mature enough to admit I kind of liked my parent's music:
My Dad listened to a ton of Level 42, but I think this album is the perfect cross-section of the songs he liked a lot and the ones I gravitated toward later in life. "The Chant Has Begun", "Kansas City Milkman" and "Hot Water" were in heavy rotation in the S-10 Pickup, but "A Floating Life", "True Believers" and "Hours By The Window" were the ones that solidified my love for this one. Still one of my favorite bands.
Metallica (1991)
As a wee lad going into fifth grade, I had a choice: Stay on the New Jack Swing path with my friend who was into that at the time, or start messing with the tough stuff. I think we know how that turned out.
Along with Nirvana's Nevermind, this was the first album I ever bought. I was 11. While I liked Nirvana, I fell in love with Metallica from the get-go. By the end of fifth grade, I had all five of their albums. This, probably more than anything, defined my tastes because it was the first real time I paid attention to a band, a genre, or even an album. And it leads nicely into my third choice...
Sepultura "Arise" (1991)
Christmas 1993: In a case of "Well THAT escalated quickly", I was already asking my parents for Sepultura for Christmas by sixth grade. I got my wish, but it wasn't a cassette. This was a copy of Arise on CD. Which meant...*gasp!*...one of the remaining packages had to be...
YES! A CD WALKMAN!
A Craig brand portable CD player to be precise. One that had a whopping ONE SECOND of anti-skip protection and lasted a whole two and a half years before I had to manually spin the disks before starting them because the motor was dead, but yeah. This is one of the best Christmas presents I ever got (as you can see from the picture below).
The album itself was the next step into heavier music which would keep getting more downtuned and brutal as the decade wore on. But 12 year old me was really digging it!
Busta Rhymes "The Coming" (1996)
I wasn't a huge fan of rap at first, but I was always interested in it. I watched Yo! MTV Raps, and even saw the premier of the "Nuthin' But A G Thang" video. I kept my ear to the genre, but felt like it wasn't for me.
Until this motherfucker came around.
One fateful Twelve CDs For a Penny thing from the Columbia House catalog later, and I was hooked. I can just about rap every single lyric from this album from memory. The video for "Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check" is the SHIIIIIT. I saw that and I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: Busta Rhymes. I wanted to be so cool, unique and out there that I fucked up your perception. When I walk down the street, you'll see me in FISH EYE LENS VISION!
Obviously, that didn't happen, BUT! This was my gateway to rap music. This was the first real album that made me whole-heartedly embraced the genre and break the static of merely being a metalhead. That fracture would become the muthafuckin' Mutara Nebula in the next few years as I opened my mind to all sorts of different genres.
Dream Theater "Metropolis Part II: Scenes From A Memory" (1999)
I always liked Dream Theater, but this is where prog took over my life for a couple years.
This was where I started paying attention to time signatures and really getting into longer, more complex songs. It was my first step onto the regrettable path of musical snobbery, but it also made me a better drummer because I had new, "super unattainable but fuck that anything's possible" goals with the instrument.
Apollo 440 "Gettin' High On Your Own Supply" (1999)
By the end of 2000, I was tired of pretty much everything I was into and was looking to get into new music. I went to hang out with my friends at the end of their shift at the bowling alley and they were listening to it while cleaning up.
This album came to my ear at exactly the right time, and it was the first of four earth-shattering albums that would shape my tastes forever.
The combination of rock and big beat electronic music (back then we just called everything techno) re-contextualized it for me in a way where I didn't think it was cheesy or gimmicky (says the Dream Theater fan). These songs had ENERGY, and I was here for it! It made me seek out a lot more music like it, but the thing is I never quite found enough. Propellorheads was cool enough, but didn't go nearly as hard (which at the time was a requirement). Chemical Brothers were good, but only the one album (Come With Us; I got into their other stuff later when I unclenched my fist). And Apollo 440 themselves only had this and Electro Glide In Blue before going all wobbly. But the world will always have this: The perfect soundtrack to being a white teenager in 2000 with his head in the clouds looking towards the future.
Billy Cobham "Total Eclipse" (1974)
This was the game changer. Before this, I couldn't take music with horns in it seriously. Before this, I thought jazz was just old, stodgy, boring bullshit. But this one changed my mind.
It was early 2001: I was working as a dishwasher during my first semester of college, and the head chef asks me: "Who's the fastest drummer in the world?" I racked my brain and said "Charlie Benante, I think." About a week later he handed me a tape with Billy Cobham's Total Eclipse on one side and John Abercrombie's Night (1984) on the other. (Abercrombie plays guitar on "Total Eclipse", as it happens; saxophonist Michael Brecker is on both as well.)
From the first song, I already knew this guy was amazing. "Solarization" is a powerhouse, 11 minute multi-part suite that goes ham right out the gate and manages to top itself by the seven minute mark (Part IV, I think?). This was something like I'd never heard. The funk, the soul, the electric ferocity of the guitar leads and the great orchestration of this ensemble, propelled forward by inhumanly fast and complex drumming. This was what I had been looking for. It made prog seem simple by comparison.
To this day, "Total Eclipse" and "Sea Of Tranquility" are two of my favorite songs of all time, the latter of which has my favorite guitar solo. John Abercrombie spent his whole life after this trying to play as subtly as possible and stick mostly to jazz standards, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT the piercing clarion of his solo on "Sea Of Tranquility" cuts the world in half every time.
Serial Experiments Lain Cyberia Mix (1998)
This one opened me up to Anime soundtracks. Before this, I was hesitant, as most opening themes sounded like cheap house music to me, but here we had lots of big beat, real moody shit, tons of bass, people yelling at you in different languages (one of which might actually be gibberish on track five) and giving you perfect music to drive to, which I was just starting to do 'round the time I copped this.
I bought this CD the same day Lateralus by Tool came out. I may have heard that album twice all the way through, but Cyberia I almost wore the fuck out. I still have it and it still plays, but I usually use a backup copy now. And that right there is kind of where metal and I started to have a falling out (which, looking back, no we didn't; just "mainstream" metal, for whatever that's worth). Between getting into electronic music (Apollo 440), prog (Dream Theater/Liquid Tension Experiment), anime (Cyberia/Trigun/Cowboy Bebop), 80's shit (Level 42), and the entry coming up next, normal music was ruined for me until like 2008. I went off into the land of strangeness and almost didn't return...
Meshuggah "Chaosphere" (1998)
I'd heard the rumors about this band for awhile: Some dude had written a master's thesis on how rhythmically complex their music was. Being this is when I was all about Dream Theater and odd time signatures, this was something I had to check out!
After about two weeks, I sold this CD to the record store behind my house. I think I burned two songs off of it and the rest...I just didn't get it. After about a month of hearing the None EP and the mix CD with those two songs on it ("New Millennium Cyanide Christ" and "Neurotica" I think) I said "Goddamit! I think I actually like this" out loud in the car, drove over to the same used CD store and bought the same copy I'd sold to them in the first place.
Music in 4/4 was plebeian bullshit to me for years after that.
Which is why it blew my mind to find out in an interview with Guitar World that most of "Chaosphere" is IN 4/4, just subdivided six ways to Saturday. The drummer's right hand is a steady, standard time signature pulse, while his other limbs are doing crazy shit. The guitar tab for "New Millennium Cyanide Christ" says it goes from 23/16 to 21/16 in the verses, and it does if you follow the guitars and the kickdrums. But the right hand is a steady, up and down 4/4. You can nod your head or tap your foot to it. That's the secret sauce of Meshuggah: Subdivisions.
Needless to say, nu metal was way WAY too primitive in comparison, pop and rap were getting on my bad side as they went the bottles/models route and beats got more polished and lifeless and even stuff like Slayer was starting to sound a little brain dead. I began a trip down a rabbit hole I didn't really come out of for years of music that had to be complex, had to be strange and had to have some kind of darkness to it.
(The thesis, which it took some time to find since the last time I read it was 2001, can be read here. The page is so old it doesn't even use CSS; it's just white text on a white background.)
For number ten I was originally gonna go with Bozzio/Levin/Stevens's "Black Light Syndrome" since it not only got me into darker, moodier melodic structures, but literally influenced the cymbals I use on my drumset to this day, but that one didn't feel quite right. It had an impact on me, but it not only didn't illustrate where I'm at with music now, but it's also an album I first heard eighteen and a half years ago.
My musical tastes usually undergo a radical pivot of some sort once every ten years: the 80's I was a kid so whatever was whatever, the 90's was hard shit all the time, the 00's was complex shit all the time...what were the 10's going to be? It turns out, a lot more about song craft, emotional resonance and it just happens that a lot of it had women on the mic:
Company Of Thieves "Ordinary Riches" (2009)
The inflection point that's eluded me for weeks thinking about this (which is one of the reasons I've been slow rolling it) finally hit me like a bolt from the blue. I bought this album the same day I bought "Cult Of Static" by Static-X (March of 2009), and it wasn't even close which one jumped out at me more. Worth noting that, though I've been doing review blogs for a long time, this is the only one of these ten that got a look, as I put it at #2 on that years Best Albums list. But a weird fact about my listening habits comes into play, one that I touched on in my Best Albums of the 2010's blog:
I can count the number of times I've heard this album all the way through on two hands and still have some fingers left.
The songs, tho. The SONGS.
"Oscar Wilde" is the one that even those most casually acquainted with Company Of Thieves are familiar with, and it's one of their best. (#3 on my Top 100 Songs of the 2000's to be precise). But dude, "In Passing" rules, "Quiet On The Front" rules, "Pressure" also made my decade list (#49). The back half of the album gets more story oriented, and normally that's not my jam, but they strike the perfect balance of being specific enough to make you care but vague enough that they aren't literal, meaning you can apply your own emotional, experiential framework on them ("The Fire Song" is my favorite of those).
This was the first real indie album I fell for and in retrospect, it shaped my taste in music for more than a decade to come.
So that's it for a trip down memory lane. Next time (hopefully next week, but nothing's guaranteed anymore) I'll be doing something more familiar, but something a little different: My first actual music review blog of the year, but with a twist. Come back and see what all the commotion's about. Stay safe out there!
These are in rough chronological order as to when they became an influence on me. The first one's a bit odd, but that's because it went from a sub-conscious to a conscious influence over time. If you ever wanted to find out what makes me tick, this is your ticket:
Level 42 "True Colours" (1984)
I picked this one because it influenced my tastes in music twice: once as a child and again after graduating high school and becoming mature enough to admit I kind of liked my parent's music:
My Dad listened to a ton of Level 42, but I think this album is the perfect cross-section of the songs he liked a lot and the ones I gravitated toward later in life. "The Chant Has Begun", "Kansas City Milkman" and "Hot Water" were in heavy rotation in the S-10 Pickup, but "A Floating Life", "True Believers" and "Hours By The Window" were the ones that solidified my love for this one. Still one of my favorite bands.
Metallica (1991)
As a wee lad going into fifth grade, I had a choice: Stay on the New Jack Swing path with my friend who was into that at the time, or start messing with the tough stuff. I think we know how that turned out.
Along with Nirvana's Nevermind, this was the first album I ever bought. I was 11. While I liked Nirvana, I fell in love with Metallica from the get-go. By the end of fifth grade, I had all five of their albums. This, probably more than anything, defined my tastes because it was the first real time I paid attention to a band, a genre, or even an album. And it leads nicely into my third choice...
Sepultura "Arise" (1991)
Christmas 1993: In a case of "Well THAT escalated quickly", I was already asking my parents for Sepultura for Christmas by sixth grade. I got my wish, but it wasn't a cassette. This was a copy of Arise on CD. Which meant...*gasp!*...one of the remaining packages had to be...
YES! A CD WALKMAN!
A Craig brand portable CD player to be precise. One that had a whopping ONE SECOND of anti-skip protection and lasted a whole two and a half years before I had to manually spin the disks before starting them because the motor was dead, but yeah. This is one of the best Christmas presents I ever got (as you can see from the picture below).
The album itself was the next step into heavier music which would keep getting more downtuned and brutal as the decade wore on. But 12 year old me was really digging it!
Busta Rhymes "The Coming" (1996)
I wasn't a huge fan of rap at first, but I was always interested in it. I watched Yo! MTV Raps, and even saw the premier of the "Nuthin' But A G Thang" video. I kept my ear to the genre, but felt like it wasn't for me.
Until this motherfucker came around.
One fateful Twelve CDs For a Penny thing from the Columbia House catalog later, and I was hooked. I can just about rap every single lyric from this album from memory. The video for "Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check" is the SHIIIIIT. I saw that and I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up: Busta Rhymes. I wanted to be so cool, unique and out there that I fucked up your perception. When I walk down the street, you'll see me in FISH EYE LENS VISION!
Obviously, that didn't happen, BUT! This was my gateway to rap music. This was the first real album that made me whole-heartedly embraced the genre and break the static of merely being a metalhead. That fracture would become the muthafuckin' Mutara Nebula in the next few years as I opened my mind to all sorts of different genres.
Dream Theater "Metropolis Part II: Scenes From A Memory" (1999)
I always liked Dream Theater, but this is where prog took over my life for a couple years.
This was where I started paying attention to time signatures and really getting into longer, more complex songs. It was my first step onto the regrettable path of musical snobbery, but it also made me a better drummer because I had new, "super unattainable but fuck that anything's possible" goals with the instrument.
Apollo 440 "Gettin' High On Your Own Supply" (1999)
By the end of 2000, I was tired of pretty much everything I was into and was looking to get into new music. I went to hang out with my friends at the end of their shift at the bowling alley and they were listening to it while cleaning up.
This album came to my ear at exactly the right time, and it was the first of four earth-shattering albums that would shape my tastes forever.
The combination of rock and big beat electronic music (back then we just called everything techno) re-contextualized it for me in a way where I didn't think it was cheesy or gimmicky (says the Dream Theater fan). These songs had ENERGY, and I was here for it! It made me seek out a lot more music like it, but the thing is I never quite found enough. Propellorheads was cool enough, but didn't go nearly as hard (which at the time was a requirement). Chemical Brothers were good, but only the one album (Come With Us; I got into their other stuff later when I unclenched my fist). And Apollo 440 themselves only had this and Electro Glide In Blue before going all wobbly. But the world will always have this: The perfect soundtrack to being a white teenager in 2000 with his head in the clouds looking towards the future.
Billy Cobham "Total Eclipse" (1974)
This was the game changer. Before this, I couldn't take music with horns in it seriously. Before this, I thought jazz was just old, stodgy, boring bullshit. But this one changed my mind.
It was early 2001: I was working as a dishwasher during my first semester of college, and the head chef asks me: "Who's the fastest drummer in the world?" I racked my brain and said "Charlie Benante, I think." About a week later he handed me a tape with Billy Cobham's Total Eclipse on one side and John Abercrombie's Night (1984) on the other. (Abercrombie plays guitar on "Total Eclipse", as it happens; saxophonist Michael Brecker is on both as well.)
From the first song, I already knew this guy was amazing. "Solarization" is a powerhouse, 11 minute multi-part suite that goes ham right out the gate and manages to top itself by the seven minute mark (Part IV, I think?). This was something like I'd never heard. The funk, the soul, the electric ferocity of the guitar leads and the great orchestration of this ensemble, propelled forward by inhumanly fast and complex drumming. This was what I had been looking for. It made prog seem simple by comparison.
To this day, "Total Eclipse" and "Sea Of Tranquility" are two of my favorite songs of all time, the latter of which has my favorite guitar solo. John Abercrombie spent his whole life after this trying to play as subtly as possible and stick mostly to jazz standards, but HOLY FUCKING SHIT the piercing clarion of his solo on "Sea Of Tranquility" cuts the world in half every time.
Serial Experiments Lain Cyberia Mix (1998)
This one opened me up to Anime soundtracks. Before this, I was hesitant, as most opening themes sounded like cheap house music to me, but here we had lots of big beat, real moody shit, tons of bass, people yelling at you in different languages (one of which might actually be gibberish on track five) and giving you perfect music to drive to, which I was just starting to do 'round the time I copped this.
I bought this CD the same day Lateralus by Tool came out. I may have heard that album twice all the way through, but Cyberia I almost wore the fuck out. I still have it and it still plays, but I usually use a backup copy now. And that right there is kind of where metal and I started to have a falling out (which, looking back, no we didn't; just "mainstream" metal, for whatever that's worth). Between getting into electronic music (Apollo 440), prog (Dream Theater/Liquid Tension Experiment), anime (Cyberia/Trigun/Cowboy Bebop), 80's shit (Level 42), and the entry coming up next, normal music was ruined for me until like 2008. I went off into the land of strangeness and almost didn't return...
Meshuggah "Chaosphere" (1998)
I'd heard the rumors about this band for awhile: Some dude had written a master's thesis on how rhythmically complex their music was. Being this is when I was all about Dream Theater and odd time signatures, this was something I had to check out!
After about two weeks, I sold this CD to the record store behind my house. I think I burned two songs off of it and the rest...I just didn't get it. After about a month of hearing the None EP and the mix CD with those two songs on it ("New Millennium Cyanide Christ" and "Neurotica" I think) I said "Goddamit! I think I actually like this" out loud in the car, drove over to the same used CD store and bought the same copy I'd sold to them in the first place.
Music in 4/4 was plebeian bullshit to me for years after that.
Which is why it blew my mind to find out in an interview with Guitar World that most of "Chaosphere" is IN 4/4, just subdivided six ways to Saturday. The drummer's right hand is a steady, standard time signature pulse, while his other limbs are doing crazy shit. The guitar tab for "New Millennium Cyanide Christ" says it goes from 23/16 to 21/16 in the verses, and it does if you follow the guitars and the kickdrums. But the right hand is a steady, up and down 4/4. You can nod your head or tap your foot to it. That's the secret sauce of Meshuggah: Subdivisions.
Needless to say, nu metal was way WAY too primitive in comparison, pop and rap were getting on my bad side as they went the bottles/models route and beats got more polished and lifeless and even stuff like Slayer was starting to sound a little brain dead. I began a trip down a rabbit hole I didn't really come out of for years of music that had to be complex, had to be strange and had to have some kind of darkness to it.
(The thesis, which it took some time to find since the last time I read it was 2001, can be read here. The page is so old it doesn't even use CSS; it's just white text on a white background.)
For number ten I was originally gonna go with Bozzio/Levin/Stevens's "Black Light Syndrome" since it not only got me into darker, moodier melodic structures, but literally influenced the cymbals I use on my drumset to this day, but that one didn't feel quite right. It had an impact on me, but it not only didn't illustrate where I'm at with music now, but it's also an album I first heard eighteen and a half years ago.
My musical tastes usually undergo a radical pivot of some sort once every ten years: the 80's I was a kid so whatever was whatever, the 90's was hard shit all the time, the 00's was complex shit all the time...what were the 10's going to be? It turns out, a lot more about song craft, emotional resonance and it just happens that a lot of it had women on the mic:
Company Of Thieves "Ordinary Riches" (2009)
The inflection point that's eluded me for weeks thinking about this (which is one of the reasons I've been slow rolling it) finally hit me like a bolt from the blue. I bought this album the same day I bought "Cult Of Static" by Static-X (March of 2009), and it wasn't even close which one jumped out at me more. Worth noting that, though I've been doing review blogs for a long time, this is the only one of these ten that got a look, as I put it at #2 on that years Best Albums list. But a weird fact about my listening habits comes into play, one that I touched on in my Best Albums of the 2010's blog:
I can count the number of times I've heard this album all the way through on two hands and still have some fingers left.
The songs, tho. The SONGS.
"Oscar Wilde" is the one that even those most casually acquainted with Company Of Thieves are familiar with, and it's one of their best. (#3 on my Top 100 Songs of the 2000's to be precise). But dude, "In Passing" rules, "Quiet On The Front" rules, "Pressure" also made my decade list (#49). The back half of the album gets more story oriented, and normally that's not my jam, but they strike the perfect balance of being specific enough to make you care but vague enough that they aren't literal, meaning you can apply your own emotional, experiential framework on them ("The Fire Song" is my favorite of those).
This was the first real indie album I fell for and in retrospect, it shaped my taste in music for more than a decade to come.
So that's it for a trip down memory lane. Next time (hopefully next week, but nothing's guaranteed anymore) I'll be doing something more familiar, but something a little different: My first actual music review blog of the year, but with a twist. Come back and see what all the commotion's about. Stay safe out there!
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