I think I started listening a few months before Live at Budokan, but my first hotly anticipated release was Octavarium. I lived, breathed and - well, shat! - Octavarium for all the months leading up to its release, and then when I finally listened to it I splurged everywhere. One of the strangest albums in their discography, with its negative-tracks and the immediate, almost poppy mood, but it's become my favourite. In fact, it did the second I started up TROAE.
The Root of All Evil and Octavarium, between them, are a good sample of my entire music taste. Variously catchy and haunting and straight-forward and rocky and metallic and soaring and exhilarating and complicated and soulful and all of these wonderful things at the same time. If someone asked me to condense my tastes in music into thirty minutes-ish, I'd plop those two on a disc and be done with it. They've got everything that I love in microcosm.