Five Albums on a Desert Island

[Davidizer13]

Let's say you get marooned on a desert island. Assuming you have/can get enough survival necessities until your eventual rescue, you've got a music player that can play them in whatever format you prefer, and that a shipping container full of batteries washed up on shore with you, what five musical albums would you most like to have with you? (No fair picking "greatest hits" albums, compilation soundtracks or extended/special editions - they have to be the artists' original albums!)

In no particular order:

Einhander OST - Kenichiro Fukui

Einhander was a video game that Square made back in the PS1 days, a dark, cyberpunk-influenced hori shmup. Fittingly, its soundtrack is dark and cyberpunk-y electronica, taking pieces from a variety of genres and styles. You've got swirling slow-building, down-tempo songs ("Dawn," "Afterimage"), heavy-hitting trance/hardcore ("Impatience," "Badlands," "Bloody Battle"), intense slow jams ("Warning," "Zero Gravity"), and ones that do all of the above, while switching time signatures like there's no tomorrow ("Conflict," "Thermosphere"). It's not just good for video game music, it's just good period, pumping tons of emotion and atmosphere out of a seemingly limited palette of sounds. You techno kids are gonna eat it up.

The Dark Side of the Moon - Pink Floyd

Adored by prog rock neckbeards, stoned teenagers and other disaffected groups the world over for years, and for good reason. It's a siren song that plays to all the feelings we've had in a world gone mad, and points at all the things that've driven us to that point: money, work, war and strife, our impending mortality, all flowing in a single, unbroken wave to the sweet, sweet experimental jazz fusion rock vocal whatever that Pink Floyd does best, with incredible production and musicmanship backing the whole thing up.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea - Neutral Milk Hotel

Hipster music at its finest: it's the best album ever made about falling romantically in love with Anne Frank - yes, that Anne Frank - to the sound of mellow guitars, a crackly male vocal and singing saws, setting the stage for the indie rock to come. Its tone is oddly triumphant, its lyrics filled with bizarre, vaguely sexual metaphors, with all different feelings spraying from every pore. (It also makes for great driving music!)

Who's Next - The Who

When you've got "Baba O'Riley" on a record, it's good.

When you've got "Behind Blue Eyes" on that same record, it's great.

When you've got "Won't Get Fooled Again" along with those two, and "Getting in Tune," and everything else that got salvaged from the Lifehouse project, all on the same record, all by The Who, it's one of the best rock and roll albums of all time.

The Beatles ("The White Album") - The Beatles

Other Beatles albums may have been more coherent, more focused, better produced, but the White Album is just straight, wild experimentalism. Every song sounds like it could have come from a different album, and that's precisely what's so great about it: you get to see the Beatles throw everything at the wall to see what sticks. Sure, a couple tracks aren't that great, but the ones that do are so absolutely brilliant and memorable ("While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Rocky Raccoon," the underrated "Long, Long, Long," "Don't Pass Me By," "Helter Skelter") that they make up for the rest of it.

Honorable Mention

Rubber Soul - The Beatles

Flood - They Might Be Giants

Octavarium - Dream Theater

Offerings - Third Day

Songs from the Big Chair - Tears for Fears

[Neane]

Plans
Small Steps, Heavy Hooves
In Rainbows
You Can't Take It With You
You're A Woman, I'm a Machine

[Tommy]

Do you mean "You Can Take it with You" as in the As Tall As Lions record?
Fantastic. I got to catch their fair well show. Such an amazing band.

Ahem.

I'm going to have to second "In The Aeroplane Over the Sea" and then go on to say (in no particular order):

-"Those Who Fear Tomorrow" by Integrity
-"Background Music" by American Nightmare/Give Up the Ghost
-"The Alchemy Index" by Thrice
-"Ghost Town" by Owen

[Xeno]

"Yourself or Someone Like You" - Matchbox Twenty

What album better defined the late 1990's than this? It produced radio staples that we still hear today. I've been listening to this album since I was 9, it would have to be with me.

"This Binary Universe" - BT

An experimental album that turned out to be a masterpiece. Considered by those who understand it to be BT's greatest work and to be an hour and fifteen minutes of wasted time by those who don't get it. The album uses frequencies to induce emotive response, to make you feel what the musician wants you to feel. If ever there was proof that music has a physical connection to the human body, this is it.

"Images and Words" - Dream Theater

What would life be like without a little metal? Arguably one of DT's softer albums, it has a more emotive feel to it than albums like Octavarium or Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence, but I like that about this album.

"Dark Side of the Moon" - Pink Floyd

As explained by David, this album is pretty important.

"Bring Me Your Love" - City and Colour

Rounding out the collection with some acoustic folk rock. This is a magnificent album, I don't think there is a bad song on this record.

[seaglass27]

Decemberunderground by AFI
DIM by the GazettE
The Best of Simon and Garfunkel
Understanding What We've Grown to Be by We Came As Romans
Captors by Wolves at the Gate

...

I think.

[seasons]

My Bloody Valentine - Loveless
After a hundred listens this still never fails to amaze me.

Boards of Canada - Music Has the Right to Children
This album has always been there for me and never let me down, I'd have to take it with.

Nas - Illmatic
The best hip-hop album I've ever heard. Every track on this is a 10/10 and it still sounds timeless.

Shuttle358 - Frame
Gorgeously textured, meditative and wistful ambient electronics that always puts me in the most calm mood.

I'm having a hard time choosing between Kind of Blue and Thriller so I think I'd just flip a coin if I had to pick my fifth choice.