What is the soundtrack of your distress?

I’m aware that question is a bit of a cliché, but you’d be surprised how seldom I get an answer from anyone.  I’ve asked this question before on my show, and no one contributes to the discussion (perhaps because it is such a cliché, or because people don’t want to open wounds).

But I want to know.  I ask this question a lot, in large part because I want to find new music I can turn to in times of heartbreak, loss and fury.  And I don’t mean single songs—no, I’m talking whole albums that appeal to my darker side, that ferry me across the emotional expanse.

So, because I’m tired of talking to myself on this subject, I’m going to put it out there one more time—and I’ll even share my own.

“…are you well in the suffering?”

The most obvious—and the one I’m listening to right now—is Coheed and Cambria’s 2005 opus, Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV, Volume One: Fear Through the Eyes of Madness.  That is one hell of a title, and in a way, it symbolizes the impenetrability of Coheed’s music to a lot of people.  They’re a prog band with a dense science fiction storyline enveloping all of their albums (even lead singer Claudio Sanchez’s side project is a spin-off of the main story).  And Sanchez’s voice gets so absurdly high that most people who aren’t already into Rush can’t stand to hear him.

Ironic, then, that the band’s most convoluted album in terms of narrative comes across as their most relatable.  The story of Coheed and Cambria is one of IRO-Bots, Monstars, Tri-Mages, and a lattice of worlds called Heaven’s Fence, but Good Apollo pulls its focus outward to tell the parallel story of the writer of the tale.  (Not so coincidentally, the Character and Writer share Sanchez’s first name.)  While the Character battles the sinister forces that command the Fence, the Writer tries to contend with the memories of a failed relationship. When he is overcome with visions suggesting he kill his ex, the Writer decides he must kill her analogue in his story.

The more universal concerns of the story lead to the band’s most direct album: at its heart, Good Apollo is about the anger and resentment following your relationship.  There’s a lot of lashing out, from the powerful, pounding “Welcome Home” (“If you really loved me/you would have endured my world”) to “Once Upon Your Dead Body” (“I hope you die right now/will you drink my chemical?”) to the “Apollo” duology (“No, girl/I don’t want to think of you anymore”).  None of it is very subtle, but none of it needs to be.

“The return of the Thin White Duke, throwing darts in lovers’ eyes…”

David Bowie’s “Station to Station” is a masterpiece of longing, despite his insistence otherwise.  It’s a collection of six songs crooned by Bowie under the guise of the Thin White Duke, a lovelorn, sadistic fascist madman.  It starts much like the title suggests, with the sound of a locomotive chugging down the line.  The title track pulls slowly from the station, putting some distance between it and its start point before the iconic above lyric, the song’s first, is sung.  And then, it builds and builds, a crescendo of need tangled with cruelty.

“Golden Years” is pure dancefloor funk, an empty expression of love, while “Word on a Wing” seems so impassioned, so pure a plea to God for some kind of understanding, that it’s shocking in itself to consider its vacancy.  (And then there’s the truly gonzo “TVC 15,” about the time Iggy Pop’s girlfriend was eaten by a television.  Yeah.  There were lots of drugs.)

But it’s the last two songs that bookend the title track so beautifully: “Stay,” my favorite song, another plea for companionship—or drugs—whichever, set to a driving guitar riff and rattling beat.  And then there’s a haunting, superior cover of “Wild is the Wind.”  Bowie pours his heart, or whatever the Duke has beating in his chest, into the song, and his band—a phenomenally tight combination—turns in a truly awesome performance.

“This is not a sin.  It’s not even original.”

After the dissolution of the original incarnation of the Divine Comedy following their debut album, frontman Neil Hannon assumed the name on his own and developed a character around the act, an amorous, literate dandy.  Neil as TDC reached his apex with 1996’s Casanova, one of the best, most cynical albums about sex ever recorded.

It begins with a breakup in the rollicking title track (“Something for the Weekend”), and the protagonist spends the remainder of the album seducing his way across Europe, luring a young woman into bed with him (“Middle Class Heroes”) before callously discarding her (the deliciously wicked “In and Out of Paris and London”), then meeting his match in a Frenchwoman who toys with his heart (“The Frog Princess”).  A meeting with Breakfast at Tiffany’s Holly Golightly is on the agenda as well in the bouncy “A Woman of the World.”

The protagonist descends into paranoia and confusion in the climactic “Through a Long and Sleepless Night,” ruminating on desire, frustration, gender, and most of all, stagnation.  It’s a marathon of furious, exquisite perversion, ending with a commitment to “live your own life, in the way that you find most amusing.”  Because as the final, Scott Walker-esque song, “The Dogs and the Horses” reminds us, “Every horse has its year, and every dog its day, my son.”

Casanova could come off as mean-spirited if it weren’t so lively, like the best Broadway musical never recorded.  Much of Neil’s best work boasts a theatrical scope, and Casanova is arguably the best of that lot, and one of my “break glass in case of broken heart” records.

“…you still look pretty when you’re putting the damage on.”

One way or another, I always return to Tori Amos and Boys for Pele.  Arguably her last truly classic album, Pele was the product of a turbulent period for Tori in her relationships with men.  While her previous album, Under the Pink, centered on the ways women can betray and destroy each other, Pele is about how women can destroy themselves over men.

At times acidic, at others icy, and often torrid, Tori’s voice guides me through Pele like a confused young lover, not only surveying the ruins of her own love life, but also the destructions of friends (“Marianne”) and even family (“Little Amsterdam”).  To me, her songs often suggest the damage that people often inflict upon themselves in the name of love (like the “little masochist” in “Hey Jupiter”).  There’s also the realization that the person you’re seeing just doesn’t measure up (“Caught a Lite Sneeze”).  And then, Tori meets the devil (“Father Lucifer”), because come on, drugs.

Boys for Pele is actually Tori Amos’ least accessible album, so I’m glad I came to it well after I’d gotten acquainted with her through her two previous albums and the one following.  Her first four albums form her “classic canon,” but to me, Pele will always be her Empire Strikes Back: the darkest, and the deepest.

So, what are some of your favorite cathartic albums?