When adding albums to your streaming collections costs a few seconds, and life involves less free time than it did when you were twenty, it’s easy to lose touch with music. It just doesn’t feel as meaningful. You neglect old loves and fail to find new ones — maybe not entirely, but as a general rule. That’s how it felt to me, and that’s why I started this CD project.

I chose a random CD from my physical music collection. I listened to it a bunch of times, sometimes in the background, sometimes with attention, until I was once again truly familiar with in. I did not listen to anything else. Then, second CD. Same thing. Until I had refamiliarised myself with it, I could only listen those two albums. Then, I added a third. And so on. It’s as if I’m building up my music collection entirely anew. It’s a lot of fun, and makes me more involved with music than I’ve been for years. After a few albums I already knew, I also started adding new ones. Here’s the collection so far:

1. Nightwish, Oceanborn (1999). Symphonic metal, power metal. I remember hearing two songs from this album on the only metal programme on the Dutch radio back in the later 90s, 120 Watt, and storming off to the record shop in Utrecht to get it. Among the first albums I had, so it has a lot of personal significance to me. It holds up pretty well! Nightwish is really good at bringing the metal guitars, the keyboards, and Tarja’s operatic vocals together without getting too far into bombast and kitsch. Highlights: Stargazers, Gethsemane, The Pharaoh Sails to Orion.
2. Radiohead, Kid A (2000). Post-rock, ambient, electronic. This was never the Radiohead record that was closest to me: I believe is got The Bends first, then OK Computer, and then Amnesiac. While Kid A didn’t sound inferior to me, it didn’t have songs that grabbed me as much as Paranoid Android or Life in a Glass House. Listening to it now with the attention it deserves, I appreciate the music very much. I still don’t feel much of an emotional connection, but I’m glad to put it up for the sheer strange beauty. Highlight: The National Anthem.
3. VNV Nation, Electric Sun (2023). Futurepop. VNV Nation are among the bands I’ve listened to most in my life. I find it hard to assess them in terms of quality; many of their songs just hit me. The beats, the cosmic voids, the emotion, the absolute refusal of cynicism. Electric Sun is not a surprising album, but it is a very fine one. There’s menace, there’s hope, there’s despair, there’s wherewithal. It’s the sound of perseverance, except in a very different genre. The club hit is Prophet, but the great song of the album — on of their best on any album — is Wait.
4. Dream Theater, Metropolis Part 2: Scenes from a Memory (1999). Progressive metal. Over the years, I’ve bought many Dream Theater CDs. But why? They’re all good, maybe even excellent… but what do you get from eight Dream Theater CDs that you didn’t already get from three or four? I suppose the only way to find that out is to take the time to really sit down and listen to them all over again, or maybe for the first time. Metropolis Part 2 was never a clear favourite of mine, since the core story about a guy going into regression therapy and then reliving the memories of a woman who got killed in a family feud, which then somehow heals him and now he knows that ‘the spirit carries on’… let’s just say it’s not my thing. With a 2026 look, it’s also not a great look at femicide, describing a murder far too much as a tragic/romantic crime passionel. But, you know, at least they were trying to bring a certain seriousness and narrative capacity into metal, which was often lacking. And the music is often gorgeous. Guys at the top of their craft.
5. Covenant (aka The Kovenant), Nexus Polaris (1998). Black metal, melodic black metal. The lyrics were not written by a gifted poet, but the cosmic insanity on display here is certainly a breath of fresh air in black metal land. What’s more, it really fits the music. Strange harmonies, mad vocals, expanding soundscapes, and a lot of serious metal ugliness underneath — this is an album with its own voice, and one that I find easy to appreciate. “What a humble vision, to forever dwell by the grace of the sun!” Changed their name to The Kovenant when they went into a more electronic direction and started to sound like the other Covenant, of Call the Ships to Port-fame. I like their later stuff too, but that’s for another time. And it seems that they might be coming back together?
6. Lou Reed, Berlin (1973). Art rock, rock opera. Goth rock avant la lettre? This was a new album for me, given to me by my friend Frank. It’s great! Telling the story of two drug addicted lovers in, one supposes, Berlin, it manages to do some very economical and powerful storytelling. And it’s bleak. There’s more dependency than love here, and more violence than sex. Haunting music, haunting words. Shows what you can do when you dare be concrete. I also like the strangely warm instrumentation on some of the tracks — perhaps this is what Leonard Cohen was going for with the weird sound of Death of a Ladies’ Man, except that Reed succeeds. And how.
7. Paradise Lost, The Plague Within (2015). Death/doom metal, gothic metal. Newly bought. I’ve listened to and enjoyed earlier Paradise Lost, especially Draconian Times, and seen them live several times. This album is heavy. Slow, slugging, doom-laden. The lyrics are criminally bad: “No hope in sight. Daylight before them dies. Enshrine the horrified. No hope in sight. Have I prayed, as a slave of lasting cries, to obey, to sedate as humour dies.” Is that coherent English or just somebody stringing gloomy words together? The music is better, but often left me a bit bored. There are some interesting moments, and the overall atmosphere is solid, but I can’t get excited by this album. It doesn’t help that the grunts feel thin. It’s not bad per se, but I could easily have done without this ’14th studio album by Britain’s gothic doom metallers’ that ‘will surprise even the most seasoned of fans in its ambition’.
8. Tarja, Frisson Noir (2026). Symphonic metal, mostly, but it’s actually quite diverse. I was expecting little, to be honest: Tarja was great as the first singer of Nightwish, but I had not specific reason to think her solo output would be good. However, this album completely convinced me! It is high quality, diverse, interesting, with many good collaborations and some cool instrumentation. The lyrics aren’t great, but who cares when you get to listen to a song like At Sea, with string solos that sound as demented as the solos in Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto — and I mean that as a compliment!
9. Beethoven, Missa Solemnis (1819-1823), conductor Philippe Herreweghe, soloists Mannion, Remmert, Taylor, Hauptmann, with La Chapelle Royale, Collegium Vocale Gent, and Orchestre des Champs-élysées. What a work! It took me while to wrap my head around it, and that wrapping is still very partial — there are more fugues in this mass than seems humanly possible. But what initially sounds like a wall of impressive sound, does make more sense when you listen more often; the movements are actually quite different from each other, and it’s all gorgeous. I can’t really comment on the Herreweghe interpretation, because I did not listen to any others.
10. Bob Marley and the Wailers, Soul Rebel (1996). This is not the 1970 album Soul Rebels (plural), but a fairly random collection of early songs. I had not ever listened to reggae, and knew next to nothing about Marley… but this is actually really nice! A lot more serious than I expected, with songs about slavery (such as 400 years), poverty and inequality — which just shows how wrong my expectations were. I love the weird spooky sounds of Mr. Brown and the catchiness of Lively Up Yourself and Stop that train. I heard a few later versions of these songs online, which are far smoother and ‘better’ produced, but these early recordings sound way better to me. Who needs smooth when they’re singing about injustice and the need for a quiet moment with some kaya?
11. Ihsahn, Pharos (2020). Ihsahn was the creative force behind black metal band Emperor, but his solo career is rather diverse. This EP brings him quite far from his origins! There are a few heavy guitars here and there, but this is prog, atmospheric, at the same time catchy and difficult. The first two songs are very nice, but the third song, Pharos, is my favourite: we are drifting on the darkened ocean depicted on the album cover while sounds wash over us. The album then gives us covers of Portishead and A-ha, both of which fit very well. I’d rather have a full length album, but this is good!
12. Various Artists, Demons of the Night: from Gothic to Dark Metal, CD 1 (1999). I must have listened to this quite often, because most of these songs were instantly familiar to me! Doing the first CD now, the second at some later point. High points for me are two songs by bands I know very well, Amorphis and Inkubus Sukkubus, and one by a rather obscure band I should track down further, The New Creatures. Other songs that make me want to listen to the band in question are from Girls Under Glass, Nightfall, Christian Death, and Still Patient?. There’s also some uninspired goth rock/metal here, such as the opener by MacBeth, and the songs of Heavenwood and Atrocity. Unsure why Gloomy Grim wanted to showcase their talent by putting a Paradise Lost cover on the album… now I still don’t know what Gloomy Grim sounds like. I’m mildly curious about Samsas Traum, which sounds like a black metal band playing Goethes Erben — I don’t like the screeching here, but in a slightly different mode this could be good. A few of the songs are forgettable, but overall quite an enjoyable overview of the goth metal scene (and some adjacent stuff) in the late 90s.