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Your 15 essential tracks.

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KharBevNor:
Now, this topic may seem a tad redundant, but I swear it has a point. This thread seems to suffer from two problems: one, that people (me included) are mainly choosing their favourite tracks of the moment, and that two, it is bloody impossible.

The point of this thread, however, is for you to identify, if you can the fifteen seminal songs of your life: the songs that have changed some aspect of you, or at least your musical taste, forever. Mine are, in order:

1: Bob Dylan - Masters of War: The first song I ever remember loving. I learned to operate a turntable simply so I could listen to it over and over again. I've never lost my love for a good, raw, honest voice or a powerful protest song, and I've never lost my appreciation of just how fucking angry Mr Dylan is here.
2: The Beatles - I Am the Walrus: Probably my first encounter with intrinsically wierd music.
3: Meatloaf - Bat Out of Hell (album version): Oh man, the intro! Meatloaf's aesthetics were also my first brush with heavy metal.
4: Pink Floyd - Another Brick In The Wall: I must have been twelve or thirteen when I first heard The Wall: this was, believe it or not, my first real brush with music that had any pretence of serious anti-establishment values.
5: Rammstein - Adios: Mutter was the first album I ever bought that wasn't by an artist my parents listened to. It rocked then, it still does. This song remains my, somewhat unusual, favourite.
6: Metallica - Enter Sandman: Quiet you. This was, quite by accident, my first encounter with what is still undoubtedly heavy metal. And when I was 14, this track rocked insane amounts of ass.
7: Cradle of Filth - Hallowed Be Thy Name: The first track I ever heard that was in any way 'extreme metal' (though looking back now it seems so incredibly tame). This established my lasting affection for both Cradle of Filth and Iron Maiden as well as totally redifining everything I thought about music.
8: Bathory - Reaper: This track is the one that turned me on to real black metal. Where would I be without it? I don't want to think.
9: Arch Enemy - Ravenous: This was a woman!? Another set of mental barriers smashed, and also my first musical crush.
10: Edge of Sanity - Blood Coloured: I think I probably played this track 40 times over when I first got it, randomly trawling kazaa lite for new music back in the good old days. It drew me like a moth to the candle of Edge of Sanity, and hence Dan Swano, and is thus single-handedly responsible for rekindling my latent interest in progressive music, dormant since childhood escapades with Floyd and Genesis.
11: Finntroll - Midnattens Widunder: Metal and polka? I had to hear this. Fuck yes I had to. Indeed, I could hardly stop myself. It was that fucking good.
12: Venom - Black Metal -  This sounds cheesy as fuck, but it was listening to this motherfucker of a track that I finally, as it were got the point of heavy metal.
13: Burzum - Ea, Lord of the Deeps: I overlooked Burzum for a criminal length of time. Hearing this track on the Fenriz 'Best of old-school Black Metal' compilation was a real eye-opener as to just what I had been missing. The sheer intensity that Varg pours into such an abstract track is almost scary. This opened not only Burzum, but also a hell of a lot more of the more minimalist stuff I had avoided till that point.
14: :wumpscut: - On the Run: This is the track that convinced me that maybe electronic music wasn't such a bad idea after all.
15: Wuthering Heights - The Land of Olden Glory: This was something else. Along with a few key others (Arch Enemy's 'Angelclaw', Maiden's 'Transylvania', to name a couple) this track is what made me pick up a guitar and make my first torturous steps down the fretboard.


Yeah, I was bored. I still think this is a neat thread idea.

boeuf:
I'll give this a whirl, but a few songs may be in my list because I really really like them, and I may not able to explain why they're important to me.

1. Harry Chapin- Cats in the Cradle My dad used to sing this to my sister and I all the time, and it was sort of appropriate because, like the father in the song, my dad wasn't around much when we were little.

2. I don't remember who sings this song-Diamonds on the Soles of her Shoes Again, this brings back memories as a child, my dad would sing my dad would sing "Ti na na, ti na na na" then my sister would sing "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" and then I'd go "OWA OWA!"  but I'd always be going "OWA OWA" even if it wasn't my part because I loved going "OWA OWA", shows what a rambunctious kid I was.

3. The B-52s, anything by them really I listened to these guys like crazy when I was growing up. I'm probably going about this list all wrong, well, tough noodles.

4. Great Big Sea- their first three ceedees. Being a Newfoundlander, I loved GBS's celtic sort of sound, and they brought out my love for dancing. I'd used to jig aliong to their songs all the time. Alone...in, my room.

Oi, this is where it starts getting tricky, I think what I'ma do is go and edit this once I've had a chance to think of my other songs. I'll be back.

deborah:
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes is Paul Simon off Graceland

Mikendher:
in chronological order:

everclear - so much for the afterglow (introduced me to music, i didn't really listen to anything seriously before this)
metallica - no leaf clover (led to my furious but short lived dip into loud music)
green day - good riddance (caused my pre-electronica alternative rock phase)
dj mind x - mon voyage dogma remix (led to another short-lived phase: hard trance)
lifehouse - hanging by a moment (caused my post-electronica alternative rock phase)
oasis - wonderwall (i started listening to softer music)
death cab for cutie - tiny vessels (i started listening to indie)
elliott smith - come out now (where i am now, listening to acoustic indie/folk)

that's not 15, but whatever

Signum_Tenebrae:
1.  Metallica - Fight Fire With Fire - Ride The Lightning was THE album that got me into metal when I was about 9 or 10 years old.  This is the first song off of that album, and after hearing the first notes I was hooked.

2.  Fear Factory - Demanufacture - My first brush with extreme (in this case death) metal.  I bought Demanufacture on cassette tape after my dad's friend gave me a Fear Factory shirt one year because he heard I was into metal.  This is the first and title track off of that album.

3.  Marilyn Manson - Diary Of A Dope Fiend - A friend of mine bought MM's "Smells Like Children" album and this track stood out inparticular to me.  I was a huge Manson fan for a long time and always loved the weird, yet intelligent ideas he had.

4.  Cradle Of Filth - Funeral In Carpathia - About 6 years ago, back when I was in Junior High School, I started hearing about Cradle Of Filth.  One of my friends bought me Dusk.. And Her Embrace on CD, and although it wasn't the first COF song I ever heard or anything, it really was a step forward in my pursuit of extreme music.

5.  Dimmu Borgir - The Insight And The Catharsis - Like most progressors into black metal, COF and DB were my first sugar coated and watered down introduction into black metal.  Spiritual Black Dimensions remains my favorite Dimmu album to this date, and this song was my favorite off of that album for a long time.

6.  Emperor - With Strength I Burn  - One word. . Epic!  Although In The Nightside Eclipse is my favorite Emperor album now, at the time when I had just bought Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk I was amazed by the grandiose yet dark atmospheres.  The clean vocals I especially liked.  My favorite song off of my first real black metal album.

7.  Darkthrone - Transilvanian Hunger - My first experience with unsymphonic black metal.  The melodies were incredible, and although at first I was a bit dissatisfied with bad production I fully realized its boon to artistic purposes later.  Inhuman screams echoing over melodic yet agressive guitars which built up a majestic atmosphere.. . Again, I was hooked.

8.  Burzum - War - Like most people hearing Burzum for the first time, I sort of thought Varg's vocals were a joke.  Though this is by far not my favorite Burzum track, it was the first of his I had ever heard and Burzum is one of my favorite bands and a huge influence to my other favorite bands.

9.  Absu - A Shield With An Iron Face - In a pursuit to listen to more "underground" black metal I looked these guys up to see what my home state has to offer.  I was fucking blown away by the intensity and speed of this black/thrash band.  Tara remains one of my favorite albums.

10.  Mercyful Fate - Curse Of The Pharaohs - MF was my first encounter with oldschool or first-wave black metal.  Again, this wasn't the first song I heard by them but one of the ones that really caught my ear and made me pursue them further.

11.  Limbonic Art - Beneath The Burial Surface - Limbonic Art is a symphony of cosmic darkness.  Being a huge HP Lovecraft fan, I am sort of obsessed with a feeling of cosmicism, space, and epic darkness in my music.  This album and song inparticular give off that feeling very well, I think.

12.  Xasthur - In The Hate Of Battle - Enter suicidal black metal, possibly my favorite genre of music.  The atmospheres in this music blew me away... It was like staring into an endless pool of darkness.  Possibly also my first favorite "kvlt" black metal band.  

13.  Nokturnal Mortum - Veles' Scrolls - Goat Horns is probably still the best symphonic black metal album out there, in my opinion.  Also its elements of folkiness I really enjoyed.  This is my favorite song off of that album, and Nokturnal Mortum remains one of my favorite bands still.

14.  Shape Of Despair - Quiet These Paintings Are - This track was my first introduction into doom metal (funeral doom, if you will.)  Being a huge fan of suicidal black metal, it was only natural that I love the incredibly depressive feelings doom metal and especially this bands conveys.  Doom is probably my second or third favorite genre of metal.

15.  Black Funeral - Sutekh (Chaos) - I tacked this one on at the end because Az-i-Dahak has been an album I've been obsessed with very recently (in the past few weeks.)  The whole album is like an infernal ceremony calling up a nameless evil.  The use of tribal drums fused with a more "industrial" drum machine give a varied sense of ancient times fused with modern darkness.  Michael Ford also claims he used human bones as part of the precussion in this album, and that's just so fucking cool.

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