That said..."If you could only own five CDs, what would they be?" Box sets & twin-disc deals could as a single unit.

My choices:

"Gladiator": What bitchin' battle music. Rises quick, floats, & ends on a nice decline.

"Neon Genesis Evangelion" S2 Works: A 7-CD brick of all the music, variants, & layers of one of the best & most thought-provoking anime series ever. Most definitely music for all moods.

"Cowboy Bebop OST 1": Quick, jazzy, bluesy...just some great tunes that run the whole spectrum.

"Stereo Type A," by Cibo Matto: Beastie Boys meets Tokyo J-pop.

"Plutonium Glow," by Vanessa Daou: Breathy erotic jazz that'll get you laid faster than Peter North in a Vivid Video flick.

Of course, those are only selected out of the 100 or so CDs I currently own; most of my music is still invested in about 380 tpaes or so.

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"There are three things I HATE, Jet: kids..pets..& women with attitudes. So WHY do we have all THREE on BOARD?!?"--Spike Spiegel

Myself?

Metallica - Metallica: Quintessential Metallica here, in between the chunkiness of 'Ride the Lightning' and the hard rock stylings of Load/Re-Load (Both of which I love, BTW.) Plus, Hetfield's voice cannot get any bettera than that on 'Enter Sandman'.

Jeff Beck - Who Else?: Guitar virtuosity at it's absolute best. 'Blow By Blow' is considered by many the definitive Jeff Beck album, but coupled with drum loops & synths, Jeff Beck kicks da booty.

Randy Edelman - Gettysburg: Sure, Williams did it with 'the Patriot', and Horner with 'Glory', but 'Gettysburg' really is the best of the best of the best of war music. Plus, there's rumblings of a pre-pubescent 'Dragonheart' in there. You can't beat that.

Steve Vai, Joe Satriani & Eric Johnson - G3 Live in concert: Vai. Satriani. Johnson. Live. Damn.

Hans Zimmer - Gladiator: Zimmer's best outing since 'Crimson Tide' and he doubles the intensity. The new age stylings of Lisa Gerrard add much needed breaks between Zimmer's harsh synths, but when he comes crescendo, his 'Holst's The Planets' based Roman themes are mind blowing. Especially the once-used theme 6:15 (?) into Track 3, The Battle. Zimmer truly is god.

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"What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad."
- Dave Barry

[This message has been edited by Ultra Magnus (edited September 06, 2000).]
 

2) The Beatles: Abbey Road - I think this is the best of the Beatle disks. Not only does the first side have classic single tunes on it but the second side, taken as a whole, is nothing short of genius.

3) Various Artists: The Best Blue Note Album In The world....Ever - A two disk set with some of the best single jazz tunes written during the Blue Note years. Featuring "Song For My Father" by Horace Silver and "Blue Train" by John Coltrane with just a ton more.

4) Diana Krall: When I Look In Your Eyes - Beautiful jazz vocals and a very romantic album.

5) Beethoven: Nine Symphonies and Overtures - This is a 5 disk set of some of the best classical music in the world.

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Runners up:

U2: Joshua Tree - Nothing the Irish lads have done before or since (save maybe The Unforgettable Fire) has approached this disk's soulful and haunting music. One of the seminal albums of my youth.

The soundtrack to Dances With Wolves - by John Barry. The "John Dunbar Theme" is the recurrent theme on the album and captures the vastness of the Great Planes quite well. But there is a part where in the theme where Barry uses strings and french horns...makes me want to cry when I hear it it's so good!

Sting: Dream Of The Blue Turtles - Sting's first solo album and a wonderful cross of pop and jazz. He had Kenny Kirkland on the piano and Branford Marsalis on the wind instruments. Great.

The Beatles: Revolver - Revolutionary. Perhaps even more so than Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band

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Oh, fiddle faddle, everyone knows that our mutants have flippers. Oops, I've said too much.....
~C. Montgomery Burns

[This message has been edited by Jay (edited September 06, 2000).]
 

'Excalibur' was composed for the most part by Trevor Jones. HOWEVER, additional music in the movie can be attributed to Carl Orff (O Fortuna}, most notably) & Richard Wagner.

The temp score set to Gladiator by Ridley Scott was a combination of 'Holst's the planets' & Orff's Fortuna suite.

Zimmer was then contracted to score the movie using the temp track as a base.

Besides, much of the 'original' music in 'Excalibur' is Jerry Goldsmith rehash, as the temp score for that film was his score for 'Magic' with a bit of 'The Prize' thrown in.

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"What happens if a big asteroid hits the Earth? Judging from realistic simulations involving a sledge hammer and a common laboratory frog, we can assume it will be pretty bad."
- Dave Barry

 

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Ready for the action now, Dangerboy
Ready if I'm ready for you, Dangerboy
Ready if I want it now, Dangerboy?
How dare you, dare you, Dangerboy?
How dare you, Dangerboy?
I dare you, dare you, Dangerboy...

�on Flux, "Thanatophobia"

At least, that's what I'd call a place where I was only allowed five CDs. But, in the interest of participation, here are five. (I'm picking them based on length and musical variety rather than pure enjoyment. That's why they aren't all TMBG or Soul Coughing albums.)

1.)Then: The Earlier Years, by They Might Be Giants.

A double disk set containing over three albums worth of music, Then represents TMBG during one of their most fertile moments. Explorations of the oddest bits of the 80's coupled with Sinatra coupled with punk and new wave and showtunes. Plus, I simply could not live without a source of Ana Ng.

2.) 69 Love Songs, by The Magnetic Fields.

I imagine that this is probably the best album you've never heard, or I would if that weren't such a cliched statement. Stephin Merritt presents 69 songs about songs about love, more or less. This one has more musical stylings then...well, anything I own, certainly, and explores themes of love from the steamy(Let's Pretend We're Bunny Rabbits, Underwear) to the lonesome (Grand Canyon) to the downright misanthropic (Yeah, Oh Yeah!, a song about marrying someone for spite and then murdering them).

3.) Ruby Vroom, by Soul Coughing.

This is the first normal length album on my list. But I have to include it because it fulfills the Surgeon General's suggested requirement for urban beat poetry jams. "And the radio man says it is five AM, and the sun has chared the other side of the world and come back to us, and painted the smoke over our heads an imperial violet." This will remind me of cities and what lies within them.

4.) The white album, by The Beatles.

Personally, I like Sgt. Pepper more, but it comes down to length and variety.

5.) This is hard. Very very hard. I want to include something, anything by XTC. On the other hand, to fit in with the desert island theme, I think I may have to pick The Moon & Antarctica, by Modest Mouse. I only recently bought it, and am not sure I would give it the extremely high praise it has garnered from music reviewers. But it's all about being alone, as I presume I will be. Unless I'm on a desert island with a handful of others from across the U.S., and we have to struggle with and against each other for love and prizes.

Hopefully Colleen will be there.

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Conservative, n. A statesman who is enamored of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
--
Ambrose Bierce
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Read chapter one of "Dirk Tungsten in...The Disappearing Planet"! It's useless to struggle.