I've been racking my mind trying to compile a list that would encompass everything that I look for in music as an art form. My tastes are going to lean on the modern side for this list, because that's the music that i was around for and really got an appreciation for, I'm fans of a lot of classic albums as well, they just didn't make the cut. Music defines me as much as video games do, I'm constantly searching for new things to listen to so if anybody has any recommendations after reading my top 5, or wants to share their own top 5, it would be appreciated.

5. of Montreal: Hissing Fauna, are You the Destroyer?

Probably the most unknown quantity on this entire list, of Montreal is fucking weird. Not as much a band as it is the insane ramblings of frontman, Kevin Barnes, who examines his psyche throughout this album, and it's never clear what's real and what's fictional. Halfway through this album, he switched from his regular character and became a black transvestite named Georgie Fruit, who he continued to stay in character as throughtout the entire next album. But musically the album is incredibly diverse, there's really nothing out there like of Montreal, it's worth putting the time in getting into them.

4. Radiohead: Kid A

In my opinion, the second greatest collection of songs ever. This album is a perfectly paced auditory journey, conveying nearly every damn emotion that you could in musical language in one amazing album. This is the apex of Radiohead, their masterpiece. There are people who worship everything Radiohead, and bless the ground that Thom Yorke walks on, and I don't really think of them THAT highly, but there is no denying the power Radiohead finds with their sound on this album.

3. Eyedea & Abillities: By the Throat

This is the perfect fusion of rap and rock, I wish is what people thought of when they heard that term instead of pieces of shit like Linkin Park. But Eyedea is so much more than that, he is by far the best lyricist in all of hip hop. His first two albums were all battle-rapping, but for his third album, made in 2009, he decided to write intensely personal songs about his heroin addiction and philosophies on the meaning of life, creating what is really the most desperate and anxious sounding album I have ever heard. Shortly after completion of this album, Eyedea died of a heroin overdose, making this album that much more heartbreaking when listening to. This album also features some ridiculously innovative DJing from DJ Abilllities that I haven't seen duplicated anywhere else, he is one of the most amazing scratchers I've heard, listen to songs like Spin Cycle to hear how he turns scratches into melody for the last minute of that song. Overall, my only complaint is this album is too short, and that we didn't get to see Eyedea build into something even more amazing that this album. This album is a reminder of a tragedy, but it also puts an amazing mind on display.

2. Rilo Kiley: The Execution of All Things

Since ya'll are gamers here on Giant Bomb, you may recognize the lead singer of Rilo Kiley, Jenny Lewis, as the girl that Fred Savage ran around with in The Wizard. Now that that completely irrelevant fact is out of the way, let me tell you why this album is great. I have a weakness for folksly indie bands with female lead singers, and this is the peak of that particular mountain. Really heartfelt lyrics, the main theme being trapped into the responsibilities of adulthood and longing for the simple innocence of childhood, sung by my favorite female voice of all time, Jenny Lewis, who has a way of making everything sound genuine. I'm going to marry her someday.

1. Modest Mouse

I could have put all of Modest Mouses first four studio albums in my top 5, but I chose to only put one at the top for the sake of diversity. This is the best collection of songs in existence, balancing triumphant heights with depressing and chaotic lows, giving the whole album a heaven-vs-hell dynamic that works beautifully. There are reoccuring phrases and themes that appear throughout the album, and once you listen enough you can piece together a loose narrative. I am pretty certain that this album is a collection of stories about different perspectives of people going through the end of the world. There are songs that are calm about the ending of all things,(The World at Large) songs exploring doubt of an afterlife in the face of death (Satin in a Coffin), songs exploring how much a psyche can take before it snaps and becomes chatotic (The Devils Workday) songs detailing regret of places unseen, feelings unknown (Black Cadillacs), and everything in between. It's an analysis of not just Issac Brock's psyche, but all of our psyche's, and it is absolutely brilliant from beginning to end. I could talk for hours upon hours upon hours about this album, and the music of every track, but I'll just end this list by saying that if you haven't heard this amazing masterpiece, click on the link above this text box and listen right now. I wish I could hear this album again for the first time, but every time I listen to it, I find something else to appreciate

And that's it, anybody else on GB a fan of any of these bands? Feel free to post your own top five in the comments, I realize this is a cliche topic at this point but I just wanted to write down a list for myself mainly

You may know Anthony Fantano from TheNeedleDrop, his popular youtube music review show, but earlier this week he made a contest to spit over this beat and he would pick the best one. I've been working on this for about two days, and I tried out a style that I've never done before on this song and am kind of curious to reactions to it, as having done the verse over and over again I'm kind of desensitized to if it actually sounds good or not.

But any impressions would be nice.

Is he a duck or a penguin? Nobody really knows. When he speaks, he speaks with a booming voice filled with authority. When he jumps, he comes crashing down with such force that it actually creates new celestial bodies that promptly implode in on themselves as soon as they are created. His hammer is so powerful that it has it's own self-sustaining fuel source. I love you King Dedede

This one wasn't nearly as serious as the last one, we were just messing around with different verses trying to come up with something dumb and ignant, but I think the end result sounded pretty good.

Questions, comments, criticisms, do all of that shit

So over the last three days my friend and I have been working on making our first serious attempt at rap music. About an hour ago we completed it, figured I may as well post in here and see what you guys think.

Any responses are appreciated. We worked really hard on this

Too many arguments are made where there is no clear verdict. Time after time people will brush each other's rebuttals off as "just opinion". I'm going to say this up front, this blog is not an opinion, it is cold, hard, fact. You cannot argue with anything I say, because it is the truth. Sure your natural human instincts may drive you to fight off the following article by denying the truth of it, but that's all that it is, denial. It's one of the five stages of grief and I will accept it as such, knowing that you will also reach acceptance at the end of the long, dark road ahead of you. Now that that's all out of the way, it's time to begin my completely fact-based blog which will prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Eternal Sonata is, in fact, a cancer to what we call "video gaming"

The Characters

The characters of Eternal Sonata are as good of a place as any to start this detailed and fair analysis of the game. In the beginning, you play as a young girl named Polka, presumably about eight years old. Clearly, the reason the developers of the game did this was because they wanted to alienate every single person that will ever play the game by designing a main character that is the exact opposite of anyone who would ever consider purchasing it. As we all know, the target demographic for video games are males ages 14-26. They don't buy games to play as little girls that look like a less sexy version of Sailor Moon, they buy them to have rabid power fantasies as manly men that tear down walls by looking at them intensely and use human faces as a base for pole-vaulting with their massive endowments. Unfortunately, none of that appears in Eternal Sonata. Instead, you get a little girl trying to cart off her shady-ass "floral powder" on everyone she meets, under the pretense that it will heal your pain, but apparently not as well as the government mandated "mineral-powder." Now let's face it polka, everyone uses mineral powder because it works better, and it's sold to them by a trusted source, rather than a terminally ill little girl on the street. You shouldn't be so upset that you can't make friends when you're the one person trying to cart off some weak-as-shit earth-grown drug on people that are hyped up from snorting crushed up minerals. This brings me to my next problem with the narrative in Eternal Sonata.

The Blatant Subliminal Messaging

Yep. Floral powder is Marijuana. This game glorifies the use of the documented #1 cause of death among young teens. Not only that, but it also tells you to defy your government even when they attempt to give you something safer and more effective. If Floral Powder is marijuana, than Mineral Powder is most certainly cocaine. In Eternal Sonata overextended use of Mineral Powder will turn you into a zombie-like creature, or something like that I really don't care, I was too busy reading my back-issues of Natural Bodybuilding magazine during the cutscenes to really get a firm grasp on whatever communist propaganda they were trying to throw at me. Let me tell you, cocaine will not turn you into a zombie. Cocaine is developed by registered scientists in well-equipped laboratories across the globe. Do you know what scientists have invented? Aspirin, Tylenol, Adderall, and Steroids come to mind. Those are all great inventions, especially when blended together and drank with vodka. Marijuana on the other hand, is grown from the earth. What has the earth invented? Poison Ivy, sharp sticks, and that tree-rape scene from the first Evil Dead movie are probably the first things on everybody's mind. Not so great when compared to science, huh?

But in the end, not even the game takes it's message seriously, because in the end, nothing matters.

In the end, it doesn't even matter

Yeah, I took that header from Linkin Park. They're kind of my favorite band, much better than anything Frederic Chopin ever composed. See, this game apparently all takes place in side of the mind of this Choppin' guy, who is a french composer or something. It really makes no sense in the end, as they never explain why he was so infatuated with watching a small girl slowly die inside of his mind. He just kind of dies peacefully and then plays piano as a ghost while all the characters in the game stare you dead in the face and yell morals at you over the credits. It probably would have been much cooler to be inside the minds of Linkin Park. Then we'd probably have giant Transformer battles set to Numb while Megan Fox dances naked in the background. I would play that video game. I think everyone pretty much would.

So in conclusion, I think I've pretty much proven my point about why Eternal Sonata is the worst game ever made. If you still want to argue that there are worse games than Eternal Sonata, you can go do it in the comments, but you're just making a fool out of yourself, as this argument is pretty bullet-proof. If you think Eternal Sonata is somehow a good game, I advise you to start back up at the top and read the entire thesis again. I'll see you down here at the bottom.

God dammit that took forever.  Found album artwork for everything, fixed all duplicates, took off all incomplete and lost albums, I feel like I need to share this accomplishment with somebody.  So HERE YA GO.
 
 

Keep in mind, it was the demo version and I have never done any sort of music on the computer before, so this was just sort of an experiment, also, the vocals were recorded with an Xbox Live mic.
 
It started out as a joke with a band comprised of my friends, I bet I could self-produce a hip-hop album by the time they got their album out which has been in production for over a year. 

So I starting doing that  
 
 
 
 Enjoy?

I figured that the topic title I chose would pull in the most views.
 
Anyway, with the leak of Kanye West's new video "Monster", the youtube comments are filled with the typical dissection of imagery and connections to the Illuminati.  This is a trend that seriously needs to stop.  Sure, the videos are supposed to be dark and sinister looking, but I don't understand how people can honestly think these artists sold their souls to the devil, and if they really were a part of the Illuminati, do you really think they would put all that fucking imagery in a publicly viewable video? Anyways, you can view the video in question below.
 
    

So you take a walk down to that farmers market
Ain't the kind to hit the town or go to target
I'm talking all up on that fine, fresh produce
But you're here looking for something to seduce
The ladies find one thing irresistible
Only one specific kind of vegetable
So when you walk through that door, with armfuls of orange
You won't even be able to turn around to shut the door hinge
They'll be all upon you like MSG on chinese
Teach them a little something bout the birds and the bees
But don't get ahead of yourself, don't fantasize
Chances are you'll all just go on and live your lives
Cause a man who uses carrots to pick up girls
Probably has quite a bit to learn about the world
But you won't leave empty handed, not a complete failure
You got what you demanded, you bought the sale of your
Carrots, now you'll snack on them around the clock
Waiting to grow rabbit skin, what's up doc'?
 
Completion time: 4 minutes
 
TAKE THAT OSSI.