Mermaid poised this: “I encourage everyone to make a “Desert Island” list. Readers of my site who have sites of their own, post it on yours. It will be interesting to see what everyone picks. The rules are simple. Given that you know you’ll be stranded on a Desert Island,.. if you could pick only 5 Albums that you could take to listen to for the rest of your life, what would they be? You can’t create mix tapes and CDs, they have to be legitimate albums. ”

5: Marilyn Manson: Antichrist Superstar – The resurrection of both Industrial and the concept album started here. Beautiful and scary at the time, the overall story is an intricate look at the down fall of a human by the fault of his own desires and needs. This is the model of the perfect concept album and lends itself to the story not only by word, but by texture and sound as well. I lived on this album for about a year on constant repeat in my stereo and played along till I knew every guitar note.

4: Deftones: Adrenaline – The first real metal album in years the Deftones blew up the 1995 rapcore scene way before Limp Bizkit ever appeared and they did right. The guitars mix perfectly with the shredded vocals, smooth bass lines, and break-beat drums. Chino Moreno is definitely one of the top vocalist of our music era. Very cool stuff. Every other nu-metal band wants to be them, but has no hope of ever coming close. Another album that I left on repeat for a year and learned every guitar note to.

3: Snapcase: Progression Through Unlearning – Real straight edge hard-core– If I had to name one band that fit that bill it would be Snapcase. When I saw them perform live I was beyond impressed and couldn’t help, but be drawn in. The album describes perfectly how society has become a lazy drug ridden and addicted mass that owes its life to poison breeding corporations full of greed. The truth has never been so apparent and perfectly spoken before.

2: Tool: Aenima – If I could take everything I liked about my previous three choices and combine it into one album without breaking the no compilation/mix tape rule it would be this album. Tool is simply the best groove based hard rock band on the face of the planet. Their songs have real meanings and themes like a concept album, but aren’t limited to one direct idea. They are hard like metal, but at the same time able to create soft beautiful melodies. They are aggressive like hard-core, but introspective like industrial. From the whooshing stacked chords of Stink Fist to the Satanic sounding spaghetti recipe Die Eier Von Satan and the last roar of Third Eye you can’t find another album that combines and breaks every music genre better. Brilliant.

1: Nine Inch Nails: Fragile – One hundred and two minutes of bliss. Sonically much softer then his previous work Trent Reznor has managed to create an album that isn’t easy to swallow in one sitting. It literally takes hours of listening and introspective reading of the lyrics book to begin to comprehend the time, as well as, passion put into this double album. Every portion, note, texture, sound, lyric, and graphic in the entire package has been obsessively looked at. Every single moment has a meaning. The feeling can be felt in the air around you as you listen to it. Fragile manages to prove that sometimes the loudest sound is the one that isn’t said at all.