Sometime around day “who even knows… time has no meaning any more” of the COVID-19 quarantine, I was tagged by a friend to post an album cover that’s influenced my life somehow. You pick a different cover each day, don’t give any explanation, and then tag someone new to repeat. Well I’m not good with the whole “no explanation” thing and I opted NOT to tag anyone, but other than that, I was in! Over ten days on Facebook, I talked about ten albums which were ground-breaking for me personally and opened the door to new things I hadn’t previously considered listening to. Maybe someone even saw something that they liked and wanted to add to their playlist. Hey, stranger things have happened! (Like a world-halting pandemic for one…)

I did a different genre, sub-genre, or concept every day along with one honorable mention for each. So let’s get started! 

Day One: Humble Beginnings

Aerosmith // Big Ones

The album (ok, technically greatest hits album) that got me listening to music in the first place? I’d call that pretty ground-breaking. Big Ones had all of Aerosmith’s hits during their years on the Geffen label and they’re all still to this day phenomenal. There’s so much to like here that one can overlook little nit-picky things… like the fact that virtually every song was helped along by song doctors during the writing process. Still, at the time I wasn’t the purist that I am today and along with the companion VHS of all the music videos, what more could a middle school-aged boy ask for? 

Honorable mention: Green Day // Dookie

I don’t need to tell you that Dookie is a masterpiece of modern punk music. I listened to it nearly every day in seventh grade and had a giant poster of the Where’s Waldo-like album cover on my wall at the time. And to this day, I think it’s fair to say that Green Day have never topped it. 

Day Two: A Solid Metal Core

Megadeth // Rust in Peace

For day two of ground-breaking albums that have impacted me personally, this one should be a no-brainer. If you’re going to listen to only one Megadeth record, Rust in Peace is unquestionably it, hands-down, full-stop. I picked this up on the eighth grade Washington trip and since I didn’t have a portable CD player at the time, had to wait until I got home to listen to it. Right out of the gates, “Holy Wars… The Punishment Due” and “Hangar 18” are quantum leaps above anything the band had done before and the solos in the latter song (especially solos 3 and 4), got me hooked on guitars years before I even held one.

Speaking of solos, Marty Friedman delivers a breathtaking minute-long one in “Tornado of Souls” and after the doomy drum and bass breather of “Dawn Patrol,” we launch into the title track: a brutal metal vision about the annihilation of all life on Earth following a nuclear exchange between the superpowers. It’s terrifying, it’s sardonic, and it still raises the hairs on the back of my neck as I type this today. 

Unlike some OTHER group’s fourth album, Rust in Peace has hardly any filler or stretched out bridges or interludes during which the band could watch the audience yawning in the front row (true story – you can look that up). With only nine songs, Rust in Peace is fast, vicious, and lean and ends just shy of the 40 minutes mark. The top two rules of showmanship are: “give the people what they want” and “leave the audience wanting more.” On this album, Dave Mustaine wildly succeeds on both. 

Honorable mention: Metallica // S&M

While I do dump on Metallica sometimes (um… see the last paragraph), even I can’t argue that their spot as THE biggest metal band on the planet is well deserved. While I’ve always been on Team Megadeth, the release of S&M in 1999 was a bittersweet career highlight and the end of an era (being the last official release with Jason Newsted on bass). As of the late nineties, not a lot of bands had experimented with a backing symphony orchestra and this took guts. It was a night of elegance and heaviness where the band was at the top of their game and joined by the brilliant late Michael Kamen and the San Francisco Symphony. This one didn’t leave my CD player for a LONG time. 

Day Three: Space to Breathe

Tool // Lateralus

It’s a little known fact that for almost twenty years, Tool’s Lateralus has been my favorite record of them all. It’s funny because they’re not even my favorite band, an honor reserved for Iron Maiden, who ironically aren’t even on this album list! I came to Tool by way of A Perfect Circle, having picked up the latter’s debut CD in 2000. That introduction to Maynard James Keenan was enough for me to follow my sister’s good advice a year later and purchase Lateralus.

Tool can be pretty out there. On prior albums, they’d had songs called “Stinkfist” and “Prison Sex,” which are exactly what you’d think they’re about. But whether you call Lateralus a mellowing or the dreaded SELLING OUT*, they moved into the new millennium with a triumph of alternative prog metal. 

The reason for its inclusion today on ground-breaking albums for me personally is its ability to expand and breathe, and find its balance throughout. While full of heavy moments like “Ticks an Leeches,” “Parabola,” and “Triad,” several moments such as the beginning of “The Patient,” the title track, and in particular “Reflection,” challenge the listener to devote their attention to where things are going and appreciate building up to the cacophony at the end of each. 

And that’s just scratching the surface of what makes this album great. I haven’t even gotten to lyrics arranged according to the Fibonacci Sequence or possibly the best filler track / album outro EVER where a panicky listener calls into Art Bell’s radio show raving about “extra-dimensional beings among us” to the sound of a dying drum machine. The band is still way out there but in an arguably better way now. 

For the most part, they’re not songs to play while driving in your car. Instead, Lateralus was the first “headphones album” that I bought and taught me to recognize the importance of anticipation and payoff. 

*Track 7 off of Ænima would like to have a word with you about that. 

Honorable mention: A Perfect Circle // Thirteenth Step

Once in a review of Thirteenth Step, I saw it referred to as “Hard Rock with a Heart.” Released in their early days before the supergroup would go on hiatus for over a decade (not unlike Tool), this record delivered fewer of the ROCKING! singles that I had been expecting after Mer De Noms but instead more atmospheric and debatably stronger songs overall. It isn’t every album that reminds you of where exactly you were when you first heard it but there’s something about four beautiful and un-skippable soft songs in a row preparing you for the coming bombast of “The Outsider” that sticks in my head and instantly transports me back to my off-campus apartment in Hazleton. 

Day Four: The Classics

Rainbow // Rising

During the short period in-between Richie Blackmore leaving Deep Purple and Ronnie James Dio joining Black Sabbath, Rainbow released three studio albums, which are among my favorite records of the seventies. Arguably the best of the three was 1976’s Rising, which was a short disc of six outstanding songs. Blackmore’s neoclassical guitar and composition married with Dio’s fantasy lyrics breathed fresh air in a genre that was already showing signs of getting stale; a trick that Dio would repeat with equal success four years later when he replaced Ozzy. 

If an album can be both timeless and dated (not that there’s anything wrong with that!), Rising fits the bill. The lyrics to “Tarot Woman” could be written at any time but that album-opening keyboard solo? It’s SUCH a seventies solo and it’s beautiful for it. At a time when the first era of Black Sabbath was already in decline, Rising was just that: a soaring and brilliant milestone of seventies fantasy metal fronted by two men who were at the height of their game. Give this one a listen if you can. 

Honorable mention: Black Sabbath // Paranoid

I couldn’t make this list of ground-breaking (mostly heavy metal) albums without mentioning Black Sabbath’s Paranoid. Recorded in 1970, its sound, structure, subject matter, etc. created THE template for virtually every rock and metal band since. The main riff of Iron Man is an instantly recognizable classic that has launched an army of both professional and amateur guitarists (including myself in the latter camp). Since picking it up sometime in college, I’d say that not six months go by where I don’t give the whole thing a listen… just to remember how it all started. 

Day Five: Beauty and the Beast

Nightwish // Once

There’s a strange story about how I picked up Once by Nightwish. Prior to leaving to teach English in Japan, I could swear that my sister had recommended it to me, not unlike her Tool suggestion of a few years before. But she denies this and claims that she never heard of them before I mentioned the name to her! Therefore the only logical explanation for me becoming a super-fan of world’s biggest symphonic metal band is that it came to me in a dream, which given their fantastical subject matter and overly ambitious (but never overstaying their welcome) themes and concept albums, it all would kind of fit…   

However, long story short, I started with this album in 2004. I do love a good bombastic, right-out-of-the-gates, in your face album opener and Once delivered it with “Dark Chest of Wonders.” The combination of Tarja Turunen’s absolutely soaring soprano vocals, the string and choir arrangements, and the traditional rock instruments underneath drove me to rush out and catch up on their back catalog, often at unfavorable import prices in Japan. Still, they were worth it. The whole album is fantastic but the crème de la crème is “Ghost Love Score,” a ten minute epic which simply needs to be heard to be believed. 

Nightwish was also the first band that I started listening to which had some rough / low male vocals (especially on some of their early songs, like “Pharaoh Sails to Orion” from the Oceanborn album). While not occurring nearly as often as Tarja’s soprano leads, they introduced me to something I’d previously sworn off. We’ll get more into that style of singing another day, though… 

Honorable mention: Leaves’ Eyes // Njord

You don’t get to be the biggest symphonic metal band in the world without inspiring a few imitators. Among the best of the “Nightwish clones” in my opinion is Leaves’ Eyes from Germany and Norway. I think I found them on Pandora or one of the streaming services around 2012 and while not quite as consistently epic and good at everything they do like Nightwish, I fell in love with the Njord album almost right away. They definitely had more rough vocals to balance out the female lead and have since become one of my favorites in the “B-band” category. Not every one of their albums is perfect but when they’re on, they are ON.