DECORP

Hoover
Keep your hands to yourself

Playlist: Dischord Desert Island

This collection of tunes pulls from Dischord records I listened to obsessively when fresh & new and continue to revisit regularly.

In my personal collection of the label’s output, Fugazi & Lungfish weigh in heavily with 16 or 17 LPs between them, and these two bands dominate the playlist. In fact, it was more of their tunes than any others that I kept having to pull out in order to trim the length of this thing down.

Missing from this playlist are bands like Minor Threat & Dag Nasty, which I keep in the LP bin, but not because of how much I did/will listen. More for their artwork, maybe a song or two buried in my mind from a friend’s mixtape or hardcore-band cover song. Those bands & records aren’t represented here.

Looking now at the entire Dischord catalog, I’m struck that my fandom spans a very specific timeframe almost exactly from 1990 to 2000. Rites of Spring snuck in retro-actively and became a favorite, but almost nothing else pre-Fugazi did. And once The Argument came out, I essentially stopped listening to new Dischord releases. There were a few more Lungfish albums, and I’ve got those and I’ve spun them each a few times, but no songs from those albums made this playlist.

There are 10+ years of Dischord prior to my actual listening interest begins, and there have been 10+ years of releases since I stopped paying attention. I’m a fan of the middle-third of the catalog, and these are some of the best tunes from that period.

NOTE: It’s a shame that Jawbox didn’t release For Your Own Special Sweetheart on Dischord. The absence of the song Savory here leaves a gaping hole in the story of these bands, this region, this sound. Also a bummer: That Shudder to Think didn’t release Pony Express Record on its natural label home — it blows to not include X-French Tee Shirt.

Playlist: Dischord Desert Island