April Playlist

In the interest of making this space a little less whiny and a little more entertaining, I’m gonna try and drop a monthly playlist of what I’m listening to for anyone who wants to play “Steve’s Desk: The Home Game”.

First up we have “Travel By Telephone” from Rival Schools, a glorious post-hardcore band made up of members of Gorilla Biscuits, Quicksand, CIV, and Youth of Today (all of which are also great bands in their own right). It’s a fun, sprawling little tune that always makes me feel more productive than I am.

“Fiction” by Neue Strassen was brought to my attention when my buddy Harper said “I’m listening to a lot of Mexican darkwave & goth right now” and I got super excited and asked for a playlist. This is one of the more jaunty tunes off that playlist, and I’m enjoying the whole thing immensely. You can find it here.

Djunah came to my attention totally by accident….a video of them performing at the Chicago Music Exchange floated across my YouTube homepage and I’m always interested in uncommon band configurations. Djunah is a two-piece with Donna Diane pulling triple-duty…she sings, plays guitar, and plays a Moog organ via foot pedals. Her compatriot, Jared Karns, *only* plays drums which seems positively relaxing by comparison. I caught them live a week ago when they came through Cleveland and they put on a good show. The new album rips and this track in particular is their first single off it and comes with a gloriously weird-ass video.

Suicidal Tendencies, a foundational part of West Coast hardcore, made it on the list because sometimes I’m driving around with my older kids and I give them random history lessons about various permutations of punk rock. I queued up “Institutionalized” for my 15-year old, who enjoyed it immensely, and then followed it up with “You Can’t Bring Me Down” to illustrate how much they leaned into metal during their later years. Then I got earwormed and kept coming back to that whole album, “Lights, Camera….Revolution” because it’s fucking great.

“Ballad of Johnny X” is an all-time favorite Bouncing Souls tune, and they were recently in town (although I missed the show because I am old and I suck sometimes). My buddy Drew took his son to the show, they were hanging out with my daughter a few days later and wearing a Souls shirt, and we got to chatting about them which always leads me to this song in particular.

I’m always in search of good “work music” which usually means something instrumental that I can let drone out behind me while I hunker down and get something done on deadline. Heavy Blanket is an instrumental sludge blues jam project from J Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. fame and it’s pretty fucking great for putting on headphones and then barreling through a ton of work.

Anytime someone mentions Atari Teenage Riot, you have to go listen to Atari Teenage Riot. That’s how it works. My buddy Sean mentioned them recently because Alec Empire followed him on Twitter or something, so I immediately slid down a week-long rabbit hole.

Toby Morse, singer for H20, has a pretty good podcast that’s worth checking out and every time a new episode comes out I inevitably spin their debut album a half dozen times. So now you get to listen to “5 Year Plan” because it’s a fantastic time capsule of mid-90s East Coast PMA hardcore.

My lovely wife is finishing up a 200-hour certification of yoga teacher training (side note: baby, I am so proud of you!) and she was recently tapping me for ideas for music for part of one her classes so I went digging for stuff that was big and expansive but still had some energy to it and ended up digging into Jane’s Addiction which was a pleasant surprise for both of us. “Ocean Size” is such a great fucking song.

“Temptation” by New Order is just a wonderful song. It makes me happy. I hope it makes you happy, too.

There you go! Enjoy!