Lately, I've been thinking how much impact some albums have had on my life (maybe in response to my Glut posting). I listen to these albums and memories flood back - the album in question is usually intrinsically tied to a significant portion of my life. It influenced things I did at the time, and it's musical pattern is truly engrained in my mind (so that I know every lyric, riff, lead, drum fill and even the gap between the tracks). Albums like these may or may not fall now in my "Top 20" favourite albums, they may have served a purpose at the time, or triggered something else in my life at that point. But these are the big ones - the one that helped form Andy over the years. So here they are, and this is the really cropped down, bare bones, list out of the 2,500+ CDs I own. I've listed them in chronological order as well (as I couldn't work out another appropriate way to list them);

• Pink Floyd; Animals (1977)
• Guns N' Roses; Appetite for Destruction (1987)
• Queensryche; Operation: Mindcrime (1988)
• Metallica; ...And Justice for All (1988)
• Megadeth; Rust In Peace (1990)
• Mr Bungle; Mr Bungle (1991)
• Dr. Dre; The Chronic (1992)
• Alice In Chains; Dirt (1992)
• Cypress Hill; Black Sunday (1993)
• Pearl Jam; Vs. (1993)
• Pantera; Far Beyond Driven (1994)
• Nine Inch Nails; The Downward Spiral (1994)
• Stone Temple Pilots; Purple (1994)
• Kyuss; Welcome to Sky Valley (1994)
• You Am I; Hourly Daily (1995)
• Something for Kate; Elsewhere for 8 minutes (1997)
• Liquid Tension Experiment; Liquid Tension Experiment (1998)
• Dream Theater; Metropolis 2: Scenes from a Memory (1999)
• Ocean Machine; Ocean Machine (2000)
• Opeth; Blackwater Park (2001)
• Coheed and Cambria; Good Apollo I'm Burning Star IV (2005)

Arguably I could've listed every GNR record, or most Dream Theater ones, but this is a much cleaner, concise list, which I think tells a pretty good story about my musical background. I urge you to hunt down each of these albums and listen to each one, with serious intent, 3 or 4 times at least. They've definitely enriched my life.

And congratulations me - this is my 400th post! :)

Labels: Music