Top 5 music albums

Five favorite music albums:

5. Yo-yo Ma: Classic Yo-Yo

This list needs a good classical album, and this sampler of Yo-Yo's beautiful cello performances of classical, film soundtrack, and folk is an excellent choice.

4. Evanescence: Fallen

It's a tragedy that Ben Moody left the band; Amy Lee's amazing voice is just a pleasant sound without his songwriting. The words, voice and music combine perfectly in this album.

3. Good Charlotte: Young and the Hopeless

I don't have enough experience with "real" punk bands to compare it to them, and they are geared toward a high-school audience, so I won't claim that Good Charlotte are great rockers. However, they do a good job with their rejection of popular culture and the story, treated in several songs, of how their father left his family when they were 16. Avoid their subsequent sellout album, The Chronicles of Life and Death.

2. Johnny Cash: The Man Comes Around

Some of the covers, such as "Tear Stained Letter" are fairly weak, but the power of the rest of the album makes up for it. "The Man Comes Around" and "I Hung My Head" are the best of the album, along with "Hurt" which has one of the few profound music videos ever made.

1. Death Cab for Cutie: Plans

When someone coined the phrase "music to my ears", he was surely talking about this album. Favorite tracks: almost all of them. I could listen to this every day for the rest of my life.





Honorable mention: Some albums that don't quite make the list, or that I haven't listened to enough to include them, are the School of Rock soundtrack (in all seriousness, I want to see the School of Rock give a live concert), Death Cab for Cutie: Transatlanticism, Eiffel 65: Europop (great electronica), and the 5 Browns: No Boundaries.

For other great top five lists, see elgaberino's posthere.