We recently upgraded our car and this one has a CD player, which gave me an excuse to dig out my old CD wallet.

Toward the back of the collection are a dozen or so CDs I had made for myself – a Metallica best of, a collection of Disney songs for the kids, and this gem: Chris Mix Really Heavy, a hand-made mixture of metal and screamo tracks that I was evidently digging at the time. But listening through it got me to thinking: what was it that landed all these songs on the album?

There are a few obvious answers. A handful of the tracks are from Guitar Hero 3, which I was still really into at the time – Fall Of Troy’s “FCPREMIX”, Slipknot’s “Before I Forget”, In Flames’ “Talk This Life” and Killswitch Engage’s “My Curse”. There are few heavy tracks that I still love to this day – Tool’s “The Pot”, Mastodon’s “Oblivion”, Machine Head’s “Spine”.

There are the Christian metal songs I was into at the time; I’ve written before about how I went through a church phase between about 2005 and 2010 or so, and a bunch of these songs come from that – Day Of Fire’s “Jacob’s Dream”, Project 86’s “The Spy Hunter”, Underoath’s “Writing On The Wall”.

And then there are a few head scratchers. Tomahawk’s “Rape This Day” is second up, and I can only assume I put it on here to be subversive. American Head Charge’s “Just So You Know” is an objectively bad song, but I must have been feeling it back then. Ditto for Norma Jean’s “Robots 3 Humans 0”. And Family Force 5’s “Love Addict”? I remember they were touring down here at some point so it must have been due to that.

A few tracks aside, that was a fun walk down memory lane.

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CLTM (Chris Listens To Music) is my attempt to listen to a new album every day; you can follow my efforts on Instagram here (and send recommendations), and if you like what I’m doing, support my efforts by shouting me a cuppa at Buy Me A Coffee.