I am constantly exposing myself to new music. Just this week I've bought two Opeth albums (old ones), a Bloodbath album and EP, the two songs currently available from Scar Symmetry's forthcoming album, and an album by a Brazillian virtuoso guitarist named Kiko Loureiro. I've also been hopping around MySpace, listening to random stuff like Owl City. When I discover new music, I really listen to it thoroughly and try to soak up the subtleties and nuances that the composers were trying to embed in their songs.  

But sometimes, I rediscover those old obsessions and I remember how amazing they are to me. Recently, I've been on an Opeth kick. I haven't really listened to them much since I obsessively saturated my speakers with Watershed after it came out last year. Then some random memory prompted me to pop in Ghost Reveries, which is probably my favorite album of theirs. It was like listening to it for the first time again, and I was totally captivated by it.  Not too many bands can serenade you with classical guitars, jazz-infused solos, melodic vocal harmonies or a solitary piano one moment and erupt into death growls and blast beats the next, all intertwined in the same 10-minute song.

Some bands just impact you in a way that's impossible to imitate. And sometimes no matter what other musical obsessions you find, you keep coming back to those ones that really captivated you when you first discovered them. For me, only a handful of bands have done that consistently — Opeth's genre-defying beauty, Children of Bodom's blazing speed and virtuosic guitar/keyboard duels, Behemoth's tightly orchestrated chaos, or Scar Symmetry's incredible vocal and guitar work. No matter how much I busy myself with new obsessions, something keeps pulling me back to those bands, and the experience of their music is never stale.  And yet, I keep listen to new music, buying new albums and trying new genres. Because I never know when I'll find something worth re-discovering.