Great Albums

This weekend, I started ripping CDs to my hard drive, but skipping over all those songs I never really cared about that were on the CDs with "the good stuff." I'm almost done because I didn't feel very well today, so didn't go to work. Ripping CDs, though, doesn't require much.

Something interesting in this exercise is that I've now gone through just about every CD I've ever bought, since I've never really thrown any out. I think I sold ten or so on eBay once upon a time, and I've certainly misplaced a few that I was expecting to find during this exercise, but haven't. I've also bought a lot less in the last few years than I did before. But I have a pretty comprehensive set of the music I've listened to since I started buying CDs almost 20 years ago, when they first became available and I switched from vinyl.

(Children: they used to put put music on relatively delicate vinyl discs about three times larger than CDs that could only be played where you had a stereo system and read the music using a needle. There were no CDs and no Internet. Really. It's okay, I can see why you wouldn't understand.)

(Even younger children: they used to put music on things called compact discs that you had to put into a player much larger than your iPod and you couldn't get the music off the Internet very easily until there was Napster. No, I mean Napster version 1.)

(Dad: yes, I remember your reel-to-reel. I think I even remember how it was used.)

Back to my point. There were a remarkably small number of albums where I bothered to rip more than a few songs. Plenty of albums only yielded one song and some yielded none. I think I can classify a really great album as one where I decided to rip most or all of the songs. Those albums don't always have songs that I would put on a list of my favorite songs, but just seem consistently good to me.

That being said, here's a list of some that fall into that category (as Artist: Album.) It includes ELO: Time, the first album I ever owned, a gift from Dad when I was 14. I'd like to hear what some of yours might be.

• Alice in Chains: Jar of Flies
• Blue Man Group: Audio
• Blue Man Group: The Complex
• The Crystal Method: Legion of Boom
• The Crystal Method: Tweekend
• The Crystal Method: Vegas
• Electric Light Orchestra: Time
• Evanescence: Fallen
• Fatboy Slim: You've Come a Long Way Baby
• Garbage: Garbage
• Genesis: Genesis
• Gin Blossoms: New Miserable Experience
• Live: Throwing Copper
• Mike + The Mechanics: Mike + The Mechanics
• Oingo Boingo: Boingo Alive
• Paul Oakenfold: Perfecto Presents Paul Oakenfold in Ibiza
• Pearl Jam: Vs.
• Planet P Project: Pink World
• The Prodigy: Fat of the Land
• Soundgarden: Superunknown
• Tweaker: The Attraction to All Things Uncertain
• U2: Achtung Baby
• ZZ Top: Eliminator