The Albums That Shaped Me | Cammy's Island

I can talk forever about music. You probably already know this. Every year, I feel I get closer to knowing exactly what I like out of my music, usually sweet pop songs couched in bizarre noises. My horizons may open and shut, but 90s and 2000s alt-rock remains a pretty safe bet for me.

It was the songs my child brain thought sounded utterly bizarre I started seeking out for myself, often in obsessive detail. Like "The Games That Shaped Me", I'm going to grab an album for each year until I turned 18 that changed the way I listened to music or soundtracked some big moment in time for me. Your recollections may vary if you remember any of this stuff (and you're weird if you do, or perhaps you're related to me).

(If I've reviewed an album on my other site, I'll be sure to link it in the header of the section. This is for more brain-off personal storytime than anything about the albums themselves.)

2003: Prehistory

I obviously wasn't seeking out music on my own at four years old, but that doesn't mean I wasn't incubating in a ton of it. My earliest musical memory was 3 Doors Down's "Kryptonite" as it blared skin-crawlingly distorted out of one of those clock radio things my mom had by her bedside. Perhaps it set the tone for all the intentional noise I'd eventually listen to. (For the record, I did have noise sensitivity issues as a kid, but they thankfully don't seem to have followed me into adulthood.)

I remember growing up in a world of 2000s pop music, everything from Britney Spears to Sean Paul to early Maroon 5 and Matchbox Twenty and those Now compilations blasting in the yard on summer evenings. My parents, especially my dad, always had our town's rock stations on, which gave me a taste for so-called "butt rock" (Nickelback, Creed, Godsmack, etc.) and an eventual appreciation for the merit in deeply uncool music. My mom sometimes reminds me how amusing she found it that I'd sing along to Puddle of Mudd's "Control"—a four-year-old singing "I love the way you smack my ass" is pretty funny.

I found myself drawn to the weird rock bands I'd see in the kids shows around me. Cartoon Network had those promos featuring The Hives, of all bands. SpongeBob was tonally hugely influenced by Ween. The B-52s would do a version of the Rocko theme. Everclear's Art Alexakis was Ned's guitar teacher on Ned's Declassified. These weren't shows made by people only themselves exposed to cartoons, they were made by artsy adults infusing their often-rather-alt influences into their current projects for the other adults who'd know of them, and it's what I'd take with me from these shows into adulthood.

I was around a lot of rap as a kid too; you wouldn't think it from everything I'd listen to now, but that just brings me to our first album on the list...

2004: Missy Elliott's Under Construction (2002)

It was the early 2000s, of course I heard a lot of rap music. Eminem was omnipresent (I remember the abject terror hearing "Kim" for the first time, of course the one where he murdered his wife), and I remember going into cousins' houses and hearing 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin' or getting the Madden and NFL Street games and being exposed to Ma$e and Killer Mike or The D.O.C. and Earshot getting mashed up on 2005, stuff like that. Then there was this album, something my older sister would play incessantly in the mid 2000s, exposing me to possibly the first album I really knew any significant chunk of.

This album's a banger. You know if it you've ever heard it. Of course Missy's flows are commanding, powerful, and occasionally filthy (I'm not saying I should have been listening to this stuff), but it's Timbaland's beats that caught tiny Cammy's ear like nothing else. It was the dark sub whines on "Work It", the raw percussion on "Funky Fresh Dressed", or the warped, wobbly hook on "Slide" that made me go "what is that?" as a child, and I still think it all sounds pretty cool today. It might not have been my music taste just yet, but I dug it too. Last time I went to stay with my older sister, we played this one—and we still liked it a lot too.

2005: Melissa Etheridge's Breakdown (1999)

If my older sister was into rap and pop and emo, it was my stepmom who gave me my entry into alt-rock proper. Our living room bookshelf was filled with shiny CDs clad in bizarre artwork that captivated my imagination, Pablo Honey and Marcy Playground and Nevermind, and as I got a bit older and I started amassing a collection of drives and players to put those CDs in, suddenly it wasn't just the imagery captivating me. This one wasn't on her bookshelf. I remember a tall (to a six year old) dresser in my parents' room that seemed like an ideal place to hide stuff little kids shouldn't get, but I could climb up on their bed and get to all of it anyway.

There was this CD up on top of it. There was this woman's face on it, and she looked a bit perturbed. I was starting to know more about the family computer than my family did, so I put the disc in the drive and was somehow fixed. I guess it was funny that I can chalk up my first musical love as a straight boy (mostly) to the lesbians, but I wasn't aware of any of that yet. Melissa, despite her heartland rock roots, has always been a little more experimental than people give her credit for, filling her mid-career songs with talkboxes and hip-hop rhythms and backwards talking. Some of it was a canny marketing choice for the new age of Alanis Morrissettes and adult contemporary. I don't think all of it was.

I still love Melissa. It used to embarrass me fairly deeply, so I gave away and have had to reamass my collection of her stuff, but I'm finally up to par with what I had as a kid. Her voice is still stellar. Her songs can be weird and slithery, especially tracks like "Into the Dark" and "Mama I'm Strange" from this one, or they can be big, gutsy, heartfelt, anthemic. Even if I'm not as up on her albums these days, I've seen her reinvent older tunes as long, strange, solo live looping things. Again, I really think there's an edgy experimental streak in her stuff that people don't appreciate enough. She's a lot more than "Come to My Window".

I don't think Breakdown or Skin or any of the albums from that era are my favorites—I think her strongest back-to-front record is probably Brave and Crazy, and that's the one I usually reach for if I want some water (wait). Breakdown is the iconic one of my childhood fixation, though. The ultra-dated but super-modern-at-the-time all lowercase, angled text art design, all soft focuses and warm colors, I adore. It's an enhanced CD, which was just the coolest fucking thing then. Maybe "Mama I'm Strange" belongs to the grand "essential Cammy listening" playlist I've yet to make. Maybe it's finally time I gave her her due like that, mom rock or not. She was my first concert, even.

2006: Red Hot Chili Peppers' Stadium Arcadium (2006)

I like to canonize Counting Crows' This Desert Life as the first album I really fell in love with, but in actual chronology, Stadium Arcadium came first. Back in 2006, before my first YouTube account, I discovered, watching Guitar Hero and Frets on Fire customs, a funky catchy band that had just put out a new album the year prior. I don't recall if I heard "Snow" or "Tell Me Baby" first, but those were definitely the first two. They came from a double album set called Stadium Arcadium, and that sure stuck with me.

If there's one mental image of my early YouTube videos I will forever carry with me, it's probably the "moving layered titles" title in Windows Movie Maker, that default white text over blue, with the title track "Stadium Arcadium" playing, watery as hell from mid-bitrate WMA turned to 64kbps mono like YouTube did back then. I sure used that album in all my videos, and I sure watched that custom someone did of "Snow" for Guitar Hero half-a-million times, amazed at such a slinky, yet painfully complex riff. I was so jealous of the people who could play Guitar Hero customs, God, I was.

To me, Stadium Arcadium is the best possible mixture of the Chili Peppers' doing their classic funk-punk thing and the sensitive, emotional, catchy tunes Californication would bring them a second wind for doing ("She Looks to Me" being quite the comfort blasting out of Caby's family's Kia Sedona the first time I visited). There's other highlights on their albums, but this is the best mix of it all, in my opinion. Most importantly, they were my first alt band, and this was my first album of theirs.

2007: The Guitar Hero and Rock Band soundtracks

As implied in the previous section, it was Guitar Hero and Rock Band that codified my taste for the rest of my days. Of course, any oral history with Harmonix would show that the teams that worked on both games were more than divided on the tones their soundtracks should cover, but I didn't care, rock music! As a hardcore Guitar Hero II fan from age eight, I found the Rock Band Band-in-a-Box bundle sitting under our Christmas tree and got hooked on everything from the Pixies to Mountain to The Killers and Beastie Boys, as I pounded the crappy PS2 drumkit the games came with into oblivion.

Is it cheating? Slightly, but you're not keeping score. These games gave me the musical education I was lacking from everyone else. It would especially be the "bonus setlists" of both, the songs from the bands of Harmonix staffers themselves and their fellow indie fixations, that would become my go-to. "Red Lottery" is still one of the heaviest things I have ever heard. "Hey" was mouthwateringly sweet pop rock I could go for anytime. Would I have heard a band like Every Time I Die or Maylene and the Sons of Disaster without Guitar Hero? Absolutely not.

I'm so glad these games have gotten a reappraisal for all the music they introduced people to. That's always been, as someone who loves the gameplay and has modded them inside and out, their real strongest point.

2008: Counting Crows' This Desert Life (1999)

Let's get back to This Desert Life. Another of those bookshelf finds, my copy to this day is still the one I swiped from her then. I explored this album on Letters back in 2019, but that's an old post now. Let's revisit it.

It was really fascinating to learn that the computer-and-loop revolution had taken over Adam Duritz around the time This Desert Life was recorded. It was how strangely off, occasionally scary, this record was that captured me. The astronaut noises and illustrations of faces superimposed onto leaves. The CD had one of those hidden tracks, the start of it jolting me awake as I fell asleep to it in my PlayStation night after night. I kept ahold of it, growing into it over time. "I Wish I Was a Girl" would take on new meaning to me in my struggles in dating. "Mrs. Potter's Lullaby", seven minutes on its own, wouldn't feel so vast. I learned every square inch of the damn thing in time.

As said in the aforementioned blog post, This Desert Life inspired me to dig deeper into sounds that were more alien, more abrasive to me. I have years of Nirvana, Beck, Weezer, and tons of heavier, weirder bands to thank Counting Crows for. It's also still my preferred Crows record. August and Everything After is the more important album to most people, but I always found this one more interesting. Recovering the Satellites is overindulgent and kinda whiny at times. Don't know anything after this one. I really think it deserves a cultural reappraisal. (And a vinyl reissue.)

2009: Nirvana's With the Lights Out (2004)

I owe the way I listen to music in general, Nirvana very much included, to With the Lights Out. I've told this story before, but my first Nirvana CD was not Nevermind or In Utero, but With the Lights Out's weird single-disc sampler Sliver: The Best of the Box. I suspect the previous discs were stolen in a car break-in my stepmom experienced a few years prior. Gnarly as the sound quality could get, the songs intrigued me enough that I would land the full three-disc set (plus their actual albums) for one of the following Christmases.

Nirvana bootleg digging, fansite hunting, and demo pondering was an institution for me as a young'un. Reading up on every single practice session, every single bit of studio time, overdubs and drum micing setups, and of course the way each song would shape up from rattling, dry-throated acoustic home demo to their final renditions proved way more interesting than any of the mawkish "Nirvana story" bullshit that seems to get everyone else. I understand if you find Nirvana overrated, I really do, but they were the first band whose catalog I memorized inside and out, and I owe a lot of my ear to them.

I'm sure I spent more time listening to With the Lights Out than I did their official albums, each disc representing one of Nirvana's three official releases. I remember bringing up Nevermind tracks to my 5th grade history teacher, wondering aloud about music video ideas I didn't even remotely have it in me to create—but I brought "Verse Chorus Verse" to that man, and he sure humored me. Both the rarities digging and the music video mind palace stuff are still how I listen to each and every album to this day.

2010: Cage the Elephant's self-titled (2008)

I don't generally keep up with bands I like anymore, but my music library was a lot smaller when I was 11. "Ain't No Rest For the Wicked" was omnipresent around this time on the radio, and my ear keen to bands like Nirvana and soon the Pixies, their modern rock proteges Cage the Elephant weren't far behind. I'd bring in, on a 4GB SanDisk flash drive no less, my rips of their self-titled into school, playing them on those chunky locked-down HP computers with the awful internal speakers in between Nirvana MIDIs and loving every minute of both. The screams, the surfy stomp of "Judas", the psychedelia of "Lotus"—oh, it was my new favorite thing.

"Lotus" was actually the first time I did any sort of creative writing to a song. I had this idea in middle school scrawled into a notebook of this guy moving far away to the mountains with his sons, one of which may have been a robot, inspired by the cynical, sociopolitical thrust of a lot of the album. It honestly reminds me of what we'd later come up with for Pennyverse, come to think of it. (No, I don't have it anymore, and I don't think I actually wrote much of anything for it.)

Thank You Happy Birthday, its follow-up, was even more influential on me. Many late nights spent browsing DeviantART on a DSi (yeah, you once could comfortably browse sites on a low-powered gaming handheld, ain't that a wild concept) listening to it through headphones. I took it to camp with me, on my green touchscreen iPod Nano, vibing around swingsets and campfires and event nights to "Rubber Ball" or "Flow" or "Right Before My Eyes", the latter shortly before I did indeed watch the world lose control for the first time. It was a more innocent, ignorant, and myopic time.

2011: Brad Sucks' I Don't Know What I'm Doing (2003)

Okay, look. This is going to be the most embarrassing thing I ever write online. I thought I might have to write this one drunk, but I am sober. I apologize if Brad ever reads this.

I always feel like I'm a decade ahead of where the culture is online. Long before Discord kittens and grooming became common parlance, I got groomed online. In the case of Brad Sucks, long before parasocial relationships with Internet creators was a thing, that was my fandom of this random, socially reclusive Canadian man who writes electrorock music. I found him through a ThinkGeek video, specifically "Never Get Out". It was zingy and warped. I wanted to hear more. It was one of the first times I found a song through some random video on YouTube.

Brad became a weird fixation, not on himself, but on his music. It was all so catchy! But it was also some of the darkest stuff I'd heard yet, and my family was falling apart and I, for the first time, felt like the weird kid in the room. It got me. I got my friends into Brad. Imagine a bunch of middle schoolers listening to this stuff wandering around residential streets, and you've got it. Guess Who's a Mess came out right as Hurricane Sandy was devastating the East Coast; I spent most of my time awake while our power was out with the preview clips of each song on my iPod Touch on repeat. As someone interested in making music, the fact you could download the separated instrument parts to all his songs and remix them was absolutely mind-blowing to me.

I did try to interact with Brad, mostly being annoying and asking for unreleased stuff, sending in weird fanart or not-remixes, or trying to help with random things he'd post to Twitter. It was a strange time; man's like twice my age, but there was a part of me that thought I could make friends with him. (This thinking was also what got me preyed on a few years later.) It took a while for him to release another album after Guess Who's a Mess; I found other things to listen to. Eventually, he started paywalling his demos and the sources to his songs started disappearing from his site (only temporarily, it's turned out). It felt a little like betrayal, embarrassingly, and I stopped listening to him altogether. Maybe instead I was just embarrassed about all those emails I sent.

All of this is silly now, of course. I'm one of his patrons on Patreon, I own all his albums in one form or another, he's part of my occasional rotation, and because Patreon integration insists, I'm also in his Discord. I chalk it up to a learning experience—I had to blunder through that to be slightly more normal to the growing number of indie musicians I have very good chats with every so often these days. You do find me posting in that Discord every so often, where I've been described as "knowing more about Brad's music than Brad does". It's just the way my brain works, I can't help it.

2012: The Black Keys' Rubber Factory (2004)

Of happier memories, 2012 was about the time I was getting into PC gaming for the first time. As you probably know, PC gaming means modding, and the Source engine, whose games I spent a lot of time in, take mods better than most. I was starting to hone my creative itches; what I spent toying around with typewriters thinking about, doodling on printer paper to depict, or dinking around in front of my webcam to film, I was starting to conceptualize using modding tools instead. (Again, don't get any big ideas. I was a dopey 14-year-old. This wasn't impressive.)

I'll touch on the creative end more with the next album, but for then, I was just an avid player, and y'know what went super well with Team Fortress 2? Rubber Factory, The Black Keys' third album. It's really the opus of their early home-recorded period, this sweaty, gritty blues-rock-by-indie-nerds traditionalist revivalist album that was just as often filled with sweet, twangy love songs and Kinks covers. My first Black Keys record was Magic Potion, and I love that one just as much, but I dunno—this one just evokes more in my head.

So yeah, on the occasion "The Lengths" and its slow slide guitars and the lyrics about firewalking pop into my head, the visuals of the splintery, dirt-floored hallways of the RED side of 2fort come with it. Same happens with "When the Lights Go Out". "Stack Shot Billy", on the other hand, soundtracks a Half-Life 2 machinima about a murder. Maybe someday I'll do something with all these little ideas, but I think I'm happy daydreaming about the past with them instead. It's a comfy place. (If only I could say the same about playing Team Fortress 2 in 2026.)

2013: Soundgarden's Superunknown (1994)

Definitely as time went on, the games stopped being the focus. For me, it was the blank slate of Source, the ease of swapping out maps or compiling models (lol right) for it, that excited me. I still played a lot of Counter-Strike: Source and all of them, but my true fixation, as characters started coming to me like imaginary friends like they did when I was 8, was Garry's Mod and the idea I could use it to make an animated show.

I wasn't happy just doing the physgun/Faceposer thing, though, nah. I wanted to learn Lua and write a new gamemode all about high quality, in-engine animations to pull it off. I was calling it Telecine, after the film-to-videotape conversion process. My thought was, no sweat of course, I'd be able to write a bunch of new systems to blend traditional Source character animation with new keyframe-based ragdoll animation. I could learn Lua; I already knew how to make a password lock in Computercraft. How hard could it be?

Where does Superunknown come into this? That was to be the name of the show, and the hectic asset-bashing of Garry's Mod its backdrop. "Superunknown", the song, felt like the ideal theme to their strange world. The story of what Superunknown was meant to be is maybe good for another time, but I just know that every time I hear "Mailman" or "Limo Wreck" or God forbid the earthquaking "4th of July", I'm back on gm_bigisland posing Pokémon ragdolls and pretending they're the Pokémon forms of these human character Counter-Strike hostages who were once reporters living in either cs_office or gm_bigcity, depending on the day, and fantasizing about the animated series I'd make out of all those ideas. I always shot a little too high, I guess.

2014: Pixies' Doolittle (1989)

By this point, having been expelled from school the previous year and almost made my way back there in this one for good behavior, I found half my day being taken up at a trade school. We had a vocational school that a bunch of school districts in our region took part in, and for a few brief months, I was enrolled in the electronics course there. Doolittle, another rhythm game find (this one Rock Band), became my soundtrack around then.

How intoxicating, for all the screamy quiet-to-loud bands I'd picked up in my CD collection over the years, to find the source of it all. Black Francis could hiss, croon, or yell his way through any number of two-minute tale of Biblical mutilation or surrealism film (depicting mutilation) as much as Joey Santiago could make his guitar shriek behind it. It was dark and eerie, it was twisted, and I found it back-to-front fantastic. This one had a Superunknown connection too; my little band of humans, I wanted to see them animated playing these songs, and weirdly, their pet Oshawott Felix would've sounded a little like Frank Black. (No, I don't get that one either.)

This was a golden age of torrenting albums for me, stopped in its tracks a few years later after Harvey Danger's Where Have All the Merrymakers Gone? netted my ISP a cease and desist). The entire Pixies discography obviously came with. Similarly noisy bands like The Jesus and Mary Chain, Ride, The Breeders, Garbage, Autolux, and My Bloody Valentine soon followed. It was a time of great musical discovery for me. My listening habits mostly crystalized around the time I was 14, and Doolittle was patient zero.

2015: Silversun Pickups' Swoon (2009)

By now, what I liked in music had crystalized to the point where I really just wanted more of it. More of that sound, that slightly oddball, heavy, fuzzy, dreamy, but still melodic and spry and poppy, sound. Silversun Pickups became the center of an entire world of music to me, but it wasn't them I was seeking out—I actually found fellow L.A. 2000s noise rockers Autolux first and heard Silversun come up in the same conversations.

Pikul, Carnavas, and Swoon are all perfect albums to me. There's not a skip on any of them. Pikul is raggedy and in flux, but it's got this springtime crispness to its semi-acoustics and dusky, high-pitched vocals that made it perfect for the end-of-year exams spent listening to it in the art room while little else was going on. Carnavas is an electrical storm of fuzzy tendrils that I routinely got lost in on 6AM bus rides. Swoon is even heavier, and occasionally quite bleak—going through my first bouts of self-doubt and insecurity at the time, something like "Growing Old is Getting Old" or "Draining" was as emotionally cathartic as it was sonically addictive.

Silversun, to me, represents the interconnectedness of bands, degrees of separation and family trees I'd climb through on the hunt for more bands with that same sort of magic. Silversun were friends with Earlimart and Pine Marten and Irving and Sea Wolf—whoops, I like all of them too. They'd tour with Snow Patrol or Elliott Smith or talk about seeing Autolux tear shit up on stage—more bands to dig into, thanks! My music nerdery was in full bloom. I even made a little Silversun Pickups fansite at the time (though admittedly, the one that made it onto Somnolescent was from a few years later).

2016: Autolux's Future Perfect (2004)

Growing up, I was used to being alone in the things I liked. I think I had one friend who somewhat liked the bands I did. My mom mostly marveled at the dumb band names. Being an indie noisemonger was a solitary pursuit. Imagine my surprise then, as we stood in line to have my senior year photos taken, and a dissonant drone I recognized came from deeper inside the photography studio. Turns out, it was Autolux's "Headless Sky", courtesy of the photographer! He'd recommend me Failure's Fantasic Planet after I excitedly mentioned liking his background music, which also became a favorite.

I've spent a lot of time recently, as of me writing this, thinking about how I don't much live in albums anymore. With so much to listen to and such big stacks of CDs waiting for me to give them a shot, I go onto the next thing all the time, hunting and never basking. It's easy to forget how limited my collection was as a kid, and how that was only starting to change in the mid-2010s. A single album, I'd get six months out of, living inside of it and memorizing every odd sound and screech, the exact inflection of every single line.

Future Perfect is the album I associate most with doing that. Through study halls, I clung to my torrented 160kbps MP3 copy of Future Perfect, just fixed on the opening chirps of the oddly jazzy, eerie "Angry Candy", or the toy pianos that chime repetitively throughout "Asleep at the Trigger", or the aggressive wails of feedback behind the chorus of "Robots in the Garden". It was grindy, heavy, but also narcotic, detached. To an insecure teenager raised in regular household chaos, a mumbled couplet like "It's a violent way we have/Even when we smile" seemed like music I could've made in another universe.

2017: Failure's Magnified (1994)

It was hard trying to choose the album that best represented 2017 to me. The late 2010s felt so busy; going to college and dropping out, splitting from bad friends, making much better friends, love for the first time giving my life direction, and suddenly experiencing this creative rebirth that would see me and my new girlfriend make this whole world and cast of characters out of nothing. It really could've been a whole bunch of albums, and some have ended up in the honorable mentions and others still, you can find reference to if you dig around the oldest pages on somnolescent.net.

At the end of the day though, I don't know if I can give it to any album except Magnified. Failure, the previous band of Autolux's Greg Edwards, focused on the aggression where Autolux focused on the droning alienation. Not that both bands didn't have both, but Magnified is possibly the most metal of Failure's albums, and one I both didn't much care for at first and one that became my world, a record I can still listen to straight through, right around this time.

Look, you want to know how important Magnified was for me, and how often I wouldn't shut up about it? Caby drew my then-new sona in the sunset glow of the most typical cover of the album. If I wasn't listening to Magnified, I was listening to the Golden comp of Failure's demos and outtakes, or Fantastic Planet, or Comfort. These were the final sacred texts to me before I came of age, forever intertwined with the ghostly afterimages of high school classrooms I'll never see again and college campuses I ran away from in my head. It was bleak, it was burned out, it was preoccupied with lobotomies and arson and got me as obsessive as its protagonists. I still don't know if I've heard anything quite as heavy as "Small Crimes" since. Greg Edwards was motivation towards me buying a bass.

Honorable mentions

Obviously, there's more albums important to me than will fit on a 15-year timeline, and no way I could ever get to everything. Here's a bit about a few more in their release order.

Big Black - Lungs (1982): You might see it as the weakest and least-developed flavor of that Big Black stinging mechanical punk sound. Weirdly, it (and subsequent EP Bulldozer) was the album I patterned my earliest attempts at computer music off of.
Ride - Nowhere (1990): Loud and shimmery and dreamy, one now inseparably linked in my head to all the time I spent as a teenager stuck in remedial classes fantasizing about my Pokémon Mystery Dungeon OCs. I'll have to show you all them sometime.
Blur - Blur (1997): I spent a whole (unhealthy) summer with my older sister with this, Starflyer 59's Gold, Hum's You'd Prefer an Astronaut, and the Smashing Pumpkins' Gish on loop. I was using up my Apple Music trial back when they gave those out. I think I own all of them now on various formats.
The Folk Implosion - Dare to Be Surprised (1997): Cheaply-produced, new wave-y dork rock I was huge into around the time I met the Somnolians and thus my girlfriend. I remember this one and Sebadoh's Bakesale being a big influence tonally on early Pennyverse.
Various Artists - The Fold Compilation (2003): The seed of a parallel fixation, I bought this solely for a rare Silversun Pickups track on it and have since found half dozen other bands I really like through it. I now pick up obscure compilations like these and like the MP3.com CD-ROMs whenever I find them cheap because there's always more to discover.
We Are Scientists - With Love and Squalor (2006): Found it through The Lonely Island's YouTube channel, believe it or not. One I often forget talking about my child self exploring for new music, but one of the earliest examples all the same. Still a damn good record.
c418 - Minecraft: Volume Alpha (2011): It's funny, because I normally play Minecraft and most of my games with the music off. These days, though, Volume Alpha gets me going for good times past and makes me wanna play more Minecraft long into the future. It's a happy place sonically.
c.layne - Maps of Us (2014): I didn't get terribly great sleep in high school. This album and Conelrad's toward compliant towers were my favorites to doze off to on the bus and in second period English class. Given their eerie but gentle soundscapes, that may have been part of the intent.
Midwestern Dirt - Down the Stairs and to the Left (2018): Speaking of Pennyverse! I actually wound up in touch with the guy behind this dusty little echoey indie rock record after my review of this album (that exact review linked there!) showed up in a Google search! We now email back and forth a few times a year and he's sent me much merch. Hopefully I can get out to Chicago to catch them live sometime, they've only gotten better with each album.

And yes, I do want to listen to just about everything on this page now after having written about them.