In everyone's record collection there are junk-food albums, the ones that you feel bad for consuming but coat your ears with happy, because you have been conditioned by everyone else to either hate them or disown them. But when push comes to shove on that media player or stereo, the junk-food albums win out.

This is just a partial list of the albums that Craig's Hlist comes back to, years and years after, for some sort of sustenance. These aren't albums that will make a hip person's top ten. Hell, they may not even make CHL's desert island top ten, but they are our own treasures.

We promise we like the "better" albums in each of these artists canons, but these comfort food items are here to stay in our collections.

Metallica, Load: Look, all Metallica is good. There is even one or two tracks on St. Anger that we can get behind. We have a link Load for reasons that go beyond any sort of fandom though. In the summer of 1996 before the eighth grade year, CHL and his dad set about to start lifting weights together so CHL could bulk up for what was about to be a short football career.

This was really one of the few things we could do together at this point in CHL's development without killing each other, the other being repeated viewings of Revenge of the Nerds. During our sessions in the high school gym, Load was constantly on the tape deck as the high school, so it became ingrained in our heads, and still to this day has great memories attached to it. Meathead jock memories, but they are CHL's memories nonetheless. It's not a great Metallica album, but it's a great rock album.