If I had a nickel for every thread like this started at this forum ever.....
Anyway, here's the deal. Back in August 2005, I invited a friend of mine to my house to chill out, and so I could steal some of his music (at that point, about 80% of the music I listened to was by an artist he'd recommended).
Of three burned CDs he brought for me to rip, one was Train of Thought and the other was Awake. That day, he tried to turn me on to Train of Thought by way of This Dying Soul. The intro bored me to death because it seemed like a lot of noise for not much depth, and then seeing that there was still 10 minutes left to the song I decided no way. However, I let him rip it anyway because he said I'd change my mind eventually.
So I kept Train of Thought on my computer and put my iTunes into shuffle mode while I played my favorite multiplayer FPS of the time (still is), Half-Life 2 Deathmatch. During one of my matches, In the Name of God came up, and I decided I didn't wanna have to exit the game, skip the track, and then get back into the game. I listened for a while and it got to the techno-sounds on JR's keyboard (just before "Justifying violence/Citing from the holy book"); now I thought that was fucking cool. I decided to keep listening, and I fell in love with ItNoG. I then discovered and loved SoC and Vacant, though the other tracks did take a while with me.
On a mad dash for more, I came back to the copy of Awake he burned me. I popped it into, loved the first four tracks, and the rest is history.