it's no secret that i love music. i'm always looking to try out new things, especially from people i know and recommend some things to them. yet, i don't tend to really get into discussions of the albums i love. i know very few people every see this blog but i'd like to share some of these in case they change your life too. "top 10" titles are catchy but this is a list of 9.

in some sort of order...

buck-tick - "seventh heaven" (1988)
1. fragile article
2. ...in heaven...
3. capsule tears -plastic syndrome III-
4. castle in the air
5. oriental love story
6. physical neurose
7. desperate girl
8. victims of love
9. memories...
10. seventh heaven

in 1989 i was living in japan and attending an international american christian school, i befriend a girl who was a big buck-tick fan and would become my best friend. the friendship was brief but the love of buck-tick stuck. i gave her a blank tape and requested she copy some songs for me so i could see what they were like. i think this album was the first thing she copied. i was hooked. i started buying their stuff and by the end of the year i went to see them live and it was my first concert ever. buck-tick has impacted my life in more ways than you can ever know but mostly they taught me what "cool" is. i looked up their influences and started checking that out. so you see, there is a domino effect.

bauhaus - "swing the heartache: the bbc sessions" (1989 compilation)
1. god in an alcove
2. telegram sam
3. double dare
4. spy in the cab
5. in the flat field
6. st. vitus dance
7. in fear of fear
8. poison pen
9. party of the first part
10. departure
11. three shadows part ii
12. silent hedges
13. swing the heartache
14. third uncle
15. ziggy stardust
16. terror couple kill colonel
17. night time
18. she's in parties

this would be one of buck-tick's influences and then became a major influence on me. this was the first bauhaus album that i ever bought, probably in fall 1990. i really liked it a lot. i still prefer the versions of some of these songs than the album versions. bauhaus broke up long before i got into them but i've had the privilege to see them play a few times reunited. i've also see peter murphy solo as well as love and rockets. none of those post projects, as good as some songs may be, can compare to bauhaus, but it's all worth checking out.

siouxsie and the banshees - "peepshow" (1988)
1. peek-a-boo
2. the killing jar
3. scarecrow
4. carousel
5. burn-up
6. ornaments of gold
7. turn to stone
8. rawhead and bloodybones
9. the last beat of my heart
10. rhapsody

the banshees were another of buck-tick's influences. for my first christmas back in america in 1990, i made a list of albums that influenced buck-tick and that was my presents request list. most people didn't get me anything from that list. (so i had to keep requesting those items every time it was a day when you get presents.) my aunt however, being a slight siouxsie fan herself, got me this album. i wasn't a fan at first, in fact my mom liked the album much quicker than i did. however, it did build on me and by the summer of 1991, i had seen siouxsie live for the first of many times to come. you see, the banshees became my second favorite band in the world and i've been attending every banshees and post breakup project concert that i could afford to do, sometimes travelling around the state to see them live, though sadly i've never seen them play anywhere besides california. to say that siouxsie and the banshees have influenced my life is putting it mildly. when siouxsie and her husband budgie, the drummer, divorced, it was as if my own parents had divorced. except by then i had learned to stop crying over parental figures breaking up. (not that i ever did cry, it was more about heartbreak and shouting/wondering "why?!")

the smiths - "hatful of hollow" (1984 compilation)
1. william, it was really nothing
2. what difference does it make?
3. these things take time
4. this charming man
5. how soon is now?
6. handsome devil
7. hand in glove
8. still ill
9. heaven knows i'm miserable now
10. this night has opened my eyes
11. you've got everything now
12. accept yourself
13. girl afraid
14. back to the old house
15. reel around the fountain
16. please, please, please let me get what i want

back to america for high school. i befriend kids who taught me what "alternative" music was. i actually already knew some of the bands but didn't understand that it might be linked together as a genre or big on the college radio scene or have some kind of cult following. one friend was a huge smiths fan so again, i asked to sample what they were like. i can't remember what album i tried first, possibly it was this one. i just remember them asking me what i thought and remember saying that i liked the songs "still ill" and possibly "cemetery gates" (so it couldn't have been this album). come to think of it, i think she lent me "rank", their live album, and to lend someone a live album is an odd choice as an introduction to a band. anyway, the point being that i fell in love with the music and could relate to morrissey's lyrics. what followed was one of those deep impacts that affected me for years. to this day i still love the smiths a lot and the first few morrissey solo albums. i'm not so much a fan of the direction morrissey has gone because you can only whine about teenage stuff for so long but where do you go from there? i don't know if he's found the answer. perhaps i too am searching for the answer.

blur - "leisure" (1991)
1. she's so high
2. there's no other way
3. bang
4. i know
5. slow down
6. repetition
7. bad day
8. high cool
9. come together
10. fool
11. birthday
12. wear me down
*usa tracklisting

i got into britpop completely on my own once i heard the "there's no other way" single. i bought the album on cassette tape (at fedco no less!) because it was cheaper and i wasn't sure if i would like the whole album or not. i ended up loving it and wished i had bought it on cd instead. i remember one night taping the band's performance on tv while at the same time listening them give a radio interview. it was just a blur-tastic evening. i also remember being to young to drive and go see their concert. later they exploded and britpop ruled the world sans america. but oh, how there were fans over here and we clung together over our love of these british bands. in fact, one of my friendships was renewed with a blaze over our passion for blur. this isn't their best album but it was sent me down the britpop path. at this point this kind of stuff was still called indie and sometimes shoegazer. a couple years later when they got popular, suddenly this and other bands were being called britpop and new wave of new wave. i did get into several of the other britpop bands but blur was always king.

x-ray spex - "germfree adolescents" (1978)
1. art-i-ficial
2. obsessed with you
3. warrior in woolworths
4. let's submerge
5. i can't do anything
6. identity
7. genetic engineering
8. i live off you
9. i am a poseur
10. germ free adolescents
11. plastic bag
12. the day the world turned day-glo

at some point in high school i decided to research the punk movement and learn about it. partly this was because buck-tick were influenced by various punk bands and partly because the banshees came out of that movement. what really fueled me was when i was put into an underachieving american history class, let's just call it that, simply because i was the new girl in school. the teacher was young and new so i think they gave him the kids nobody wanted. since i wasn't an idiot, the teacher thought i should do extra work. he said i could write a report (gee thanks) on anything i wanted as long as it had to do with american history. fine, i'll write about the 1970s london punk scene but throw in enough reference to what was going on in new york and los angeles at the time so that i could say it was about american history. this was back in the day when people when to libraries. i found as many books as i could find and transcribed some picture disc banshee interview records i had. i may have quoted a lot but i had my own cliff notes version of the punk movement as a result of that assignment. i shared it with a friend who loved it. (sadly i do not have a copy anymore.) as part of my buck-tick influences research, i had been buying various punk albums but i think i got a few more while writing the paper. i'm not sure exactly when i got into x-ray spex but this album proved to be highly influential, perhaps because i was a germfree adolescent? later during my first year of college, i bonded with a TA over our mutual love of x-ray spex. punk with saxophone? damn right. you gotta love x-ray spex!

café tacuba - "re" (1994)
1. el aparato
2. la ingrata
3. el cicló
4. el borrego
5. esa noche
6. 24 horas
7. ixtepec
8. tró de cáncer
9. el metro
10. el fin de la infancia
11. madrugal
12. pez
13. verde
14. la negrita
15. el tlatoani del barrio
16. las flores
17. la pinta
18. el baile y el salón
19. el puñal y el corazón
20. el balcón

i was introduced to rock en españ in 1994 and this is the band that reeled me in. i'm pretty sure that this was not the first album i bought, that i had first purchased their debut album with a gift card i received as a christmas present, but the purchase of this their second album soon followed. this is a long album with a lot of stuff going on. i feel like it has something for everyone unless you do not like nasally singing. the popularity of the band has exploded and i am thankful that i do not live in their home country as going to concerts there must be insane. instead, i get to see them play in tiny venues on this side of the border and relish the intimate atmosphere. as the band was my gateway to rock en español, if it can even be called a genre as it belittles musicians to group them together by language alone, i am forever indebted. their work of late has not been up to par but i have great memories.

jane's addiction - "ritual de lo habitual" (1990)
1. stop!
2. no one's leaving
3. ain't no right
4. obvious
5. been caught stealing
6. three days
7. then she did...
8. of course
9. classic girl

i bought this some time in 1990 or 1991 after moving back to america and becoming a kroq 106.7fm disciple (los angeles alternative radio station). i liked the music and watched the music videos on tv but wasn't that into jane's addiction. (i think i was just too young to fully appreciate it.) i did however want to see them at lollapalooza 1991, which i already mentioned attending, but i didn't get to see them and have promised to stop whining about it. a few years later when i met my future partner, it was the only album that we both had in our collections so it's quite special in that respect. we both really got into the band for the reunions since 1997 and perhaps got a bit too fanatical but had really great times in the process. i mean, i think there was a point where i only listened to jane's for days on end, i was searching all the magazines and web sites for news, i was travelling around the state for shows, i got (most of?) the members to sign a rare promo item (this album's voodoo dolly), i was following up on the side/post projects, made a web site on one of the members, made various friends with other fans over the internet (some quite close to whom i still keep in contact with), and all that kind of stuff.

cradle of filth - "vempire or dark faerytales in phallustein" (1996 ep)
1. ebony dressed for sunset
2. the forest whispers my name
3. queen of winter, throned
4. nocturnal supremacy
5. she mourns a lengthening shadow
6. the rape and ruin of angels (hosannas in extremis)

this ep is long enough that i consider it an album (because metal songs are freakin' long). in high school i hated metal but then later in college i wanted to try to understand this thing, especially when i started learning about black metal. so i did some reading to learn what kind of bands are the pioneers and went to the record shops to try a few albums. while i was into it for awhile, the one cd that really got me was this one. it's not black metal but it's really fast technical playing with luscious melodies and clear production. i love everything about it, even the background vocals, but the drumming on this is simply superb. i still get goosebumps listening to some of these songs. now that i think about it, i think that metal is the only genre that can give me goosebumps. that's what's so interesting about it since i disliked metal for the longest time until i got a best friend who was a metalhead and i decided to get schooled on it.