Rock Solid!

Here are five albums that I have owned for ten years or more that still get regular rotation.

Tool "Aenima"
Anyone that knows me at all, knows that I'm gonna mention this album.  In my early twenties, I was wandering into some murky territory as far as heavy music is concerned.  I happened to get a last minute ticket to the Lallapalooza festival in 97, in all honesty I was going to see this ripping new band named "Korn", but to my disappointment they had cancelled at the last minute.  I was bummed, but I did notice that Tool was playing, and I was kind of digging the videos they had on MTV.  From the second they hit the stage, I was enthralled.  I had been to a handful of shows by this point, but I had never seen anything like this.  My life changed that day.  I became obsessed, it's all I would talk about for months.  I bought all of their albums, but Aenima was the one that I played repeatedly, over and over and over.  For years.  I think it was about two years later that I started digging on Clutch, and that was the first time I started weaning myself off of Aenima.  I put it away for awhile  but I just recently started listening to it again, and it's still great.  This album is the closest music has come to "magic" for me.  Zeppelin goes there sometimes, and there's a lot of heavy bands that can give me the chills sometimes, but this album, from start to finish, it's eerie, there's something going on in there.  Something I can't put my finger on.  My interest in Tool's output pretty much ended with this album, I've tried to listen to their later albums many times, and the music is very similar, but it just doesn't have that "thing".  Maybe my favorite album ever.

Guns 'n Roses "Appetite For Destrucition"
My dirtball neighbor turned me on to this when I was eleven years old.  Who can deny what a rock and roll masterpeice this is?  What can I even say about this album?  It's perfect.  No one will ever do it again.

Sonic Youth "Goo"
I picked this up on a whim when I was fourteen.  I was buying whatever Thrasher magazine was promoting at the time.   I was into it from the first time I listened to it.  It was one of those times that I knew my life would never be the same.  It was the first time an album seemed like a work of art to me.  It was noisy and melodic at once.  There were tones coming from the guitars that I had never heard before, and haven't heard since.  I recently bought Goo for the third time, and upon listening to it just the other day, I can't get over the guitar tones.  I've been playing guitar for twenty years.  I didn't know what Thurston and company were doing to get those tones when I was fourteen, and I still have no idea how they make those sounds.

Clutch "The Elephant Riders"
I mentioned earlier how Clutch was the band to get me out of the Tool bender I was on.  My buddies and I were full on into Clutch from the get-go, but when Elephant Riders came out, I knew this was my favorite, and it still is.  I tend to lean towards the mid tempo stuff, no matter what band it is.  The lyrics are smart.  The songs are clean and tasteful.  The premise is something about civil war soldiers riding elephants.  Clutch is still one of THE best rock bands on the planet, and I could listen to this song till the 011101010101000's fall off the disc.

Faith No More "Introduce Yourself"
Like most dudes my age, I fell headfirst into FNM when the "Epic" video started getting play on the MTV.  My freinds and I would all buy a different album from a band that we recently got into, then dub up some tapes so we all could have that band's entire collection.  We soon realised that FNM had a different singer before this Mike Patton fella got on board.  SO completely before it's time, Introduce Yourself became THE album of our youth.  The funny thing here is that I am an enormous Mike Patton fan, but when I listen to the Chuck Mosely albums, I can almost smell my buddies stanky room when we were in middle school, casting spells on girls we were crushing on.   I just purchased this for the third time, and it's so good it creeps me out.