Desert Island Sounds

Google Reader stopped giving me endless updates on bored housewives running workouts and pictures of their meals (I would post links so everybody can enjoy the inanity, but I don't want to send any page views their way) just in time to give me this, a little teaser video from the upcoming album of one of my new favorite bands, M83. The discovery of this little video clip came right after I finished reading one of the Reactions columns from The Sceptical Chymist blog. Every week they ask a chemist a few questions that give a little insight into the personal side of the researchers. One of the questions is which book and which album would they want with them if they were stranded on a desert island. The association between the M83 clip and the Reactions column got me wondering what would be on my CD list.

I guess it would likely be one of the CD's that has been central to my life at one time or another. Here are a few possibilities:

Depeche Mode - Violator
This album (well, cassette tape was the main medium at the time) got me through many 3 or 4 hour bus rides to and from basketball games in various dinky cities in eastern New Mexico. I still listen to it from time to time. It hasn't lost it's appeal.

Tool - Aenima
I loved Undertow, but this is the CD that made Tool a regular feature in my CD player through college. I can't imagine how many pages I wrote listening to it. I don't listen to it much anymore, mainly because it sounds crappy on my iPod, but there will never come a time when I don't have the Tool library in whatever media music happens to be popular in at the moment.

Radiohead - OK Computer/Amnesiac/Kid A
I loved OK Computer, for whatever reason I can still remember buying that CD. My page count with this CD probably rivals Aenima. I almost felt betrayed the first time I listened to Kid A. I hated it. What were they trying to prove? I kept listening to it though. Once I got over listening for OK Computer part 2, I started to dig the new sound. Amnesiac completed my conversion.

Muse - I'm not sure which one
I got my first iPod soon after I discovered Muse. Their CD's are all a big mash to me because I listened to them on shuffle so many times. I would like to pick a few of my favorite songs to make my own mix CD.

Oceansize - Effloresce
I read about this CD on some hipster website while sitting in office hours while I was in grad school. I had no idea what the band sounded like, but I was obsessed with getting the CD. The second it showed up in Tower, I  picked it up and took it to the lab to check it out. I liked it the first couple of times I listened to it, then I started to become obsessed with it. M83 gives me the same vibe that I found so moving in tracks on this CD (Saturday Morning Breakfast Show in particular). The band released a couple of albums after this one, but they went down hill quickly after losing a key member of the group. They broke up a year or so ago.

Linkin Park - A Thousand Suns
This is the only thing in my Mog library that I keep going back to on a regular basis (although the M83 stuff and Gang Gang Dance's Eye Contact are also getting multiple repeat plays). I will likely associate it with my trip to Boston for my job interview for a little while (I had it on pretty much the entire time I was in my hotel room getting ready for my interview). I read one review that compared it to an OK Computer like move for Linkin Park. I can't help but dig it.