It has been a week, folks. No sleep, a complete freakout at 2am this morning because I realized at that moment that I mistook AM for PM when book my family’s vacation weeks ago, meaning instead of arriving at 11:59AM and meeting our friends for the day we weren’t arriving until midnight. Try booking a new flight and canceling your old one with a day’s notice when there’s a global Microsoft outage affecting the banks and airlines (thanks, Cyberstrike!). Anyway, I need this vacation more than even I realized, and this playlist reflects some of the kind of music I’ll be pushing through my earholes over the next 10 days.

Which means posting here is going to be pretty limited until I return in August. Anyway, let’s see what’s on deck.

• Tame Impala – “Desire Be Desire Go”
• Fishbone – “Ghetto Soundwave”
• The Damned – “Wait For The Blackout”
• Beach House – “Myth”
• The Beach Boys – “God Only Knows”

I’m not a fan of Kevin Parker and the weird, pop-musk vibe he’s lately been doling out as Tame Impala, but first album InnersSpeaker is an absolute psychedelic garage rock banger, and it’s my go-to album every time I’m on vacation…On the other hand, I am eternally wedded to the music of Fishbone. Truth and Soul is my favorite album by them, and “Ghetto Soundwave” just screams hot sun, equal parts party and rage… I’ve gone on record before saying The Damned is my favorite punk band, and I listen to a lot of 70s punk over the summer months, so choosing just one track to represent that here was hard. The opening track to 1980’s The Black Album is as good as any…Overall I love hazy, psychedelic rock and pop during my downtime, and Beach House consistently brings it hard with every album. Bloom was the first album where I really took notice, and “Myth” is just a lovely track…Plus there’s that “beach” reference, and I decided to continue it with some classic Beach Boys. Because of course I’m going to listen to some Beach Boys, ya know?

• The Ruts – “Babylon’s Burning”
• David Bowie – “Rebel Rebel”
• The Flower Kings – “Rumble Fish Twist”
• toe – “Loneliness Will Shine”
• Wand – “xoxo”

A little more punk, slightly less known courtesy of The Ruts. If you’re new to the field or simply limit yourselves to the big guns like The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks and The Ramones you should do yourself a service and check out the stellar pipes of Malcolm Owen and this reggae-inspired band…Vacation time also means just soaking in old, favorite friends. Like David Bowie who was not a friend but is one of my favorite artists ever and I did have a fun interaction with him once at a Muse concert…I realize that the chances of me getting another Flower Kings review during vacation is slim to none, but I’m going to keep listening to Space Revolver anyway and see if I can squeeze some time to write in…Speaking of my favorite bands, Japanese math/psych rock veterans toe have returned with a surprise new album. I’ve only just started digging into Now I See The Light, and that’s something I’m going to change during the next week and a half…That’s something I wish I could do with Vertigo, the new album from psych rock (see a trend here?) band Wand, but despite getting my vinyl early the actual album doesn’t release until next Friday, so I’m going to have to wait a bit.

• The Rolling Stones – “100 Years Ago”
• Ty Segall and White Fence – “Body Behavior”
• Frank Zappa – “Inca Roads”

More favorites…The Rolling Stones are perfect for literally any time, so I want to spend some time away from my favorite trio of records (Beggars…, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers) and push onto the underrated Goats Head Soup…There was a big family vacation to St. Petes a few years ago where I played the Ty Segall/White Fence collaboration Joy the whole time, so why not include it here again…Finally, once of my favorite Frank Zappa compositions, coming just over a month before I see Dweezil Zappa in concert perform Apostrophe (‘) and One Size Fits All in their entirety…

Be safe, and see you next week.