Music, at its core, is about emotion: anything that grabs your attention and invokes humor, anger, or excitement is doing its job. (Music that isn’t is probably on the radio.) So to start off my list this year, I honor Delirium Cordia, an album that strikes awe, wonder, and most of all, fear, into the listener. It’s not even really “music” per se, but the careful orchestration of “parts” bumping into each other. Someone could take the ideas here and put together a metal album, or a collection of instrumental pieces, but as it stands, it’s a cluttered nightmare punctuated by the medical noises and breathing of a surgery gone wrong. As one long track, it’s hard to digest, but nothing lingers for longer than two minutes, so those with short attention spans could probably turn it on, get disturbed, and float on to something else, but as much as it affected me, I can’t leave it off the list.
