Michael Gagnon tagged me into the 1 Album a day for 10 days Challenge. So, here we go. These are all albums that have stuck with me, that I listen to pretty regularly, and all have music that changed the way I understood music as an art and as a science. DAY 2: LIFE OF AGONY: RIVER RUNS RED I love me some heavy shit. This is one of the heaviest sounding albums ever. It’s claustrophobia inducing. But here’s the thing: A lot of heavy music is great, but lyrically, it’s disingenuous crap. Fake anger, fake pain, fake satanism, whatever. I love a good schtick, but seriously, it gets thing sometimes. This album is the dead opposite of that. This album is about some real shit, and while it’s a nominal fiction, if you stuck with LoA through the years, you might have an idea of just how close to the bone this was written. Suicide, familial alcoholism, abuse. It’s not a comfortable album, but it’s musically amazing and painfully reflective of a lot of experience. Additionally, the band were between the ages of 18 and (I think) 24 when they wrote this, and it’s an extremely mature execution of a concept album, let alone in this genre.