I was cleaning up my basement and came across my big wallet of CDs that I used to keep in my car. I contemplated just chucking out the whole thing but I said, why not give them each one last ride and share my thoughts on my favorite platform for navel gazing about media. I imagine I’m going to not feel like a lot of it holds up, decades later in my life.
This isn’t all the CDs I’ve ever owned, just a lot of them that were in the “active rotation”, at least for in the car. It includes CDs acquired from roughly age 12 to age 25 or so. Not sure exactly when I switched to mainly digital music acquisition, but that sounds about right.
I’ll post some thoughts per album and embed 1 song per that I’m willing to go to bat for. I’ll be listening in the car, as was typical. I can get through about 1 album per round trip to and from work. I will try to update ITT as close to real time as I can.
These are presented in no particular order, this case used to be meticulously organized and now shit is just thrown in there and I don’t care enough to rearrange.
As such we’re jumping into the deep end of the cringe pool with Believe by Disturbed. It doesn’t hold up. It’s not as easy to enjoy as a nostalgia artifact or ironically as The Sickness, and feels a lot less like Nu Metal and more like… slightly heavy/groovy Butt Rock. We all know how much David Draiman sucks so I won’t go there, separating the art from the artist yada yada
I really like Draiman’s voice honestly, but on this album it’s in service to a lot of lyrical drivel. Incel Anthems, weird self-aggrandizing Us vs Them songs with a lot of religious overtones (sometimes on the side of Us and sometimes on the side of Them). I’ve done a lot of growing as a person in the last 20 years so this all feels very emotionally immature and not in a way that I want to revert to for the sake of enjoying the tunes, ya know?
Some of the songs are fun structurally, some decent grooves and riffs etc but the overall sound feels indistinct (outside of the vocals).
I Will Go To Bat For
“Rise”
This was one of my favorites back at the time of release (2002, my how time flies). The self-styled savior stuff is in there but bothers me less here. It’s punchy, kind of energizing. I can tell why I liked it as driving music for sure.
I saw Disturbed in concert once or twice when they were at their apex and their lead singer may have been the most “rehearsed my moves and patter in the mirror for hours” guy I’ve ever seen perform. The slow almost wave to try and get the crowd to slowly quiet down from one side to the other, a bit about how you shouldn’t raise your middle fingers at the band because it means “fuck you” and that’s actually disrespectful that all these years later I still can’t tell if was earnest or not (a few songs later they did Stupify which had him raising his middle fingers along with the crowd at the end of more or less every line), like I’m definitely for a lead singer who goes for too much than not enough but… yeah him being a bit of an egomaniac was like the least shocking news ever.
Yeah they are old now and a CD Binder ain’t taking up that much room. I can feel that is a thing that will only grow power in nostalgia and meaning as we approach OLD.
I will watch this thread with great interest though.
I threw away a lot of my cds because they don’t work anymore it’s one of the reasons I got into vinyl. rip all my demo CDRS from tiny bay area bands that aren’t tiny anymore. I uploaded a bunch of em forever ago it just bums me out
I did a bunch of driving today so I got two whole albums in.
First up, As the Palaces Burn by Lamb of God. Damn! This album kicks heaps of ass. I didn’t remember it being the kind of album with no songs I want to skip. Just rock solid metal, there’s some cheese in there but that’s like 9 out of 10 metal albums.
I Will Go To Bat For
Pretty much the whole damn thing! But here’s a song that really blew my hair back while I was listening:
“11th Hour”
Second, I listened to Sweet Weaponry by Cruiserweight. This is pop-punky alt rock fronted by a woman whose voice feels like it was grown in a lab to sing these kinds of songs. There’s a lot of songs on this album that made me restless and I had to force myself to sit through them, but there’s some with singular elements I really like – a hook or a catchy chorus, etc. I think tracks 3 and 4 are the best and make a good one-two punch.
I Will Go To Bat For
“At the End of the Tunnel There is Always a Shining Light”
In a universe more aligned with my tastes this band could have risen to One Hit Wonder fame on the back of this song.
This is a much weirder album than I remember it being, for ostensibly a pop record (Soul & Gospel-tinged though it may be) a lot of the tracks are experimental.
I guess credit for that goes to Danger Mouse, the other half of the duo with Cee Lo Green. Sometimes leaning a little too weird into Goofy territory. “Crazy” was imho one of the better top-40 songs of its time and is one of the most accessible songs on the album, though there’s a few other more straightforward toe-tappers.
I Will Go To Bat For
The whole album I think is worth a listen because it feels like such an oddity. Some songs feel like Cee Lo Green singing over the beats from a Portishead or Massive Attack beat, one or two feel like joke songs.
Here’s the opening track which I think braces the listener for the fact that “Crazy” is actually an outlier on the album in terms of being a “normal” radio song:
Today I listened to Interventions + Lullabies by The Format. It kinda left me.. whelmed. Every track is a 6/10. I doubt I listened to this much back in the day outside of maybe one or two songs.
I Will Go To Bat For
“Tie the Rope” (Content warning for suicide metaphor although maybe upbeat enough to disarm the image somewhat)
i remember posting the song about suicide on here like “what is it that i like about this so much?” and Cuba was like “the heavy use of crash cymbal?” and i was like “yes that’s it! thank you!”
at that point im not sure if it came across that sharing the song as a FF7 Advent Children AMV was a goof, but fuck it ironic distance from cringe is cheugy
So technically the next CD in the case was Cowboys From Hell by Pantera but I elected not to listen because unlike the others it hasn’t been years since I last listened and I don’t think listening now will change how I feel about it (I like it a lot).
But I will share a story:
This album was my gateway into Metal and it happened by accident. As a young teen I was hugely into electronic music, heavily influenced by a friend and his much older brother. The latter was kind enough one day to give me a used cassette tape to record a bunch of songs off his various techno CDs. I didn’t fill the tape fully, and after my techno cut off on the B-side, there was Cowboys From Hell which blew my 13 year old mind. The rest is history.
Therefore the next album I listened to was Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation by Darkest Hour. I like this, very good riffing, I can not understand more than 10% of the vocals because the screaming is very inarticulate. I had a moment where I laughed because damn in the early 2000s between subtitled anime and metal/hardcore vocals I couldn’t parse without the album liner notes I was consuming a lot of media where I required a translation.
I Will Go To Bat For
“Marching to the Killing Rhythm”
Lyrically this one feels very timely but I suppose this kind of song is evergreen regarding activities of the military industrial complex.
it’s one of the reasons I got into vinyl. rip all my demo CDRS from tiny bay area bands that aren’t tiny anymore. I uploaded a bunch of em forever ago it just bums me out