Albums That Influenced My Music Taste Pt.1

A little while ago, I was tagged to do the “10 Albums that Influenced Your Musical Taste” challenge on Facebook. While, I didn’t participate in it due to how anxiety inducing it was to pick just 10 albums, it got me thinking about how my musical taste came to be. So, instead of just posting covers for 10 albums that heavily influenced my taste in music, I decided to do a write up of a small selection of my favorite albums.

The Monitor — Titus Andronicus

Let me set the stage. It was right before Christmas break during my sophmore year of high school. I was getting ready for Algebra 2 when one of my best friends at the time sat down next to me and hands me a cd he burned for me. I ask him what was on it and he responds with “Its a punk rock album”.

Growing up in the 2000s, my perception of modern punk rock was defined by mainstream pop punk bands like Fall Out Boy, Blink 182, and Sum 41. The almost sameness of their sound and the “angsty just to be angsty” attitude grew weary on me, thus I was a bit hesitent on this album at first. He reassured me that I’ll like it, and he was not wrong.

As soon as I got home, I popped the cd into my computer and listened to it all the way through multiple times that night. I was enamored by the album. It was chaotic but also full of familiar American folk melodies. It was full of angst but the angst was focused. The lyrics about societal frustration, depression, isolation, hopelessness, and self-denigration were delievered through the Springsteen-esque impassioned howling vocals of Patrick Stickles in the backdrop of the American Civil War. Everything sounded like it was recorded through a 4-track cassette recorder in someone’s basement, but it was perfect for the album. It was dirty, raw, and, in the end, uplifting. It’s become one of my favorite albums of all time, and remains in my heavy rotation playlists.

Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating In Space — Spiritualized

From the meloncolically delievered “All I want in life’s a little bit of love to take the pain away” in the opening seconds to the jaded and subdued crooning of “I will love you even if I’m getting to the end” in the outro of the closing track, Spiritualized takes you through a chaotic 70 minute odyssey through love, loss, depression, and addiction.

With each song filled to the brim with layers upon layers of instrumentation, ususual synth tones and feedback samples, voice samples, and even a choir, Jason Pierce (the band’s primary songwriter) manages to create some of the most hauntingly beautiful soundscapes that I have ever heard. He really makes you empathize with the protagonist as he experiences the highs and lows of his life, eventually coming to terms with his inevitable death at the hands of his insatiable hunger for an escape.

This is one of the albums that just stuck with me through my life.There were times I felt like no other album related better to my mental or emotional state. There were times I felt like I needed to listen to this album for comfort. Whenever people ask me what my favorite album was, I often told them that it was Pink Floyd’s The Wall; but, after giving it more thought, I think this is it.

Colors — Between The Buried and Me

Anyone who knew me in high school knew that I was absolutely obsessed with this band. Alaska, their previous album, blew me away with it’s uniquely eccentric style of what can only be described as “progressive technical death metal with jazz fusion”. While Alaska served as a good introduction for the band’s music, nothing prepared me for Colors.

Musicians often cite a varied flurry of influences when making their tracks, and Betweeen the Buried and Me is no exception. From the opening minutes of Colors, the band transitions from a song that could’ve been taken from Pink Floyd’s Animals to a death metal breakdown that would’ve felt right at home in an Atheist album. At a certain point, the band even transitions from a thrash passage to a Dream Theater-esque buildup, into a sequence reminicent of early electronic music, into a death metal breakdown, into a dual guitar solo influcenced by Baroque period violin lines, into a post-rock Russian Circles-esque sound, exploding into bluegrass passage, all within the same song.

The erratic shifts between genres isn’t done as a novelty, all of these sounds and textures accentuate the songs. In the track “Informal Gluttony” the guitars play a Phrygian Dominant scale over the consistent beating of toms, conjuring forth an image of Ancient Egypt; while the lyrics are about how we are all slaves to modern society. The song “Sun of Nothing” transitions between periods of blaring guitars and drums to quiet moments of piano and soft vocals, reflecting the thoughts of the protagonist as he slowly drifts on a lonely voyage towards the sun.

This album didn’t get me into a new genre or appreciate a genre that I didn’t appreciate before; instead, this album made me realize the endless possibilities of music. It was my first foray into a truely experimental sound, and it remains one of my all time favorite albums.

Wonderful Rainbow — Lightning Bolt

You know how most people describe Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica as the album that takes several listens to finally get? Well, this album is my Trout Mask Replica. At first, I didn’t really understand what I was listening to. There were familiar grooves and melodies capsulated by noise and chaotic polyrythms. The harsh production did them no favors as well. You could tell that Brian Chippendale was singing something, but the tracks were being sent through layers upon layers of distortion and gain so that you can only make out a tiny semblance of what he’s saying without looking up the lyrics.

The deeper you get into the album, the less familiar it gets. By the time you get to “Wonderful Rainbow”, you realize that all the traditional conventions of music need to be thrown out the window. By this point, even genius.com gives up on transcribing the lyrics and just left it saying “gibberish”. Once you get to “Duel in the Deep”, it felt like when Captain Willard finally reaches Colonel Kurtz’s camp in Apocalypse Now. He couldn’t help but stand in awe, despite not understanding what he was seeing.

Even though I didn’t understand this album at first, I kept going back to it. The energy of the performances had me hooked. Thats when I realized that the album isn’t about the content, but the energy and passion in the performances. It was the first time I experienced musical storytelling through pure energy. Without this album, I would’ve never been entranced by the noisy underground experimental music scene.

Atrocity Exhibition — Danny Brown

I was introduced to Danny Brown through his 2013 project, Old. The first half of the album told the story of his life pre-fame. He rapped about growing up surrounded by drugs and violence, leading to him getting arrested for dealing drugs in order to survive out on the streets. The second half of the album opens up to trap banger after trap banger as Danny details his life after making it in the music industry. He lives his life in a never ending party cycle, surrounded by all the drugs, money, and sex that he wants; but it ends on a somber note, with Danny Brown confessing that all the partying he does is just his way of coping with the horrors of his old life.

With Atrocity Exhibition, Danny Brown continues the story of Old. At this point, he realized that his self-destructive behaviours are leading him into a downward spiral where he struggles to find any reason to live. The instruments also reflect this change in tone. Gone are the trap beats of Old or the heavy oldschool beats of XXX, in their place are sinister sounding samples taken from obscure artists like electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire and the heavily overlooked krautrock band Guru Guru.

This album’s borderline dissonant samples and beats, coupled with the dark lyrical content and the emotional investment it demands make it one of the most challenging albums I’ve ever listened to. Instead of being pushed away from it, it almost implored me to explore more the seedy underbelly of underground hip-hop. This album opened up the floodgates, and I don’t ever want to go back.