Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by guest Peter Suderman. Suderman is the features editor at Reason magazine. He also writes the Substack Cocktails With Suderman, which is about making better cocktails at home. Find him online at Reason or @petersuderman on Twitter/X.

Peter’s Music Pick: The Dismemberment Plan
The name might sound like you’re in for a three-and-a-half hour barrage of trendily obscure post-punk music with this episode, and you could not be more wrong. Though we’re not going to lie: The first album and a half from Washington, D.C.’s mid-to-late Nineties indie-rock darlings do feel an awful lot like the twitchily inchoate remnants of the Bad Brains/Fugazi regional hardcore scene of the Eighties with a healthy dose of West Coast Minutemen math-rock thrown in as metric ballast. What they quickly settled into around the turn of the century however, with albums like The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, Emergency & I, and Change, was not just a genre-defining statement of what “indie-rock” was supposed to be about during what we now know retrospectively -- and jadedly -- as “the PitchforkMedia era” of rock criticism, but timeless music that can still get a crowd of downcast nerds to start dancing uncontrollably as they muse about that time they too got ruinously drunk on New Year’s Eve.

It is quite possible that (outside of that one Robbie Fulks episode) Political Beats may be covering its most obscure rock group to date with the Dismemberment Plan. Click now, remedy that, and open yourself to a life of dangerous possibilities.

Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are with guest Nick Lowe. Nick Lowe is . . . wait, you don’t really need a bio for Nick Lowe, do you? If there’s any questions about who he is, please take the time to listen to our lengthy Political Beats episode with guest Matt Murray.

In an interview that has been months in the making, your Political Beats hosts get the opportunity to spend a little more than an hour with the legendary Nick Lowe. Cards on the table, both of us were a little nervous to be speaking with one of our musical heroes. Nick made it comfortable and entertaining, as if anything else would be expected.

The conversation begins with a discussion about his fantastic new album, Indoor Safari.

The record is a collection of songs from EPs released over the past half-decade or so, many of the tunes re-recorded or slightly changed from the initial versions. These performances are so crisp, so lively. “Crying Inside,” is a perfect example of a top-notch, sublimely written and executed, late-career Nick Lowe song. “A Quiet Place” could be the single best band performance on the album. “Blue on Blue,” would fit in alongside anything on The Impossible Bird and the Bacharach-influenced “Different Kind of Blue,” truly benefits from the full band arrangement not heard on the version found on the 20th Anniversary edition of The Convincer.

As the liner notes claim, “Indoor Safari isn’t a journey back in time -- it’s a journey out of time, to a music that stands the test of any time.”

We begin our chat in the present but quickly move far afield, with discussions about his early career, the thought process that started his “second half” of music (starting with The Impossible Bird), his songwriting techniques, and a few nerd/fan questions near the end. We hope to have asked a few questions that perhaps haven't been asked before.

Be sure to check out Nick and Los Straitjackets live this fall.

Tour dates are here

(Click on "Show All Dates" to see them all.) If you’re out and about, you might see Scot at the Detroit show and Jeff at one of the Chicago shows. After all, we’re big fans.

Introducing the Band:
Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with . . . no guest at all! With Jeff moving his belongings to a new abode while also covering the RNC and DNC for National Review and Scot's vacation schedule creating another hurdle, we felt it was time to break the glass on the window marked "VERY SPECIAL EPISODE."

For those relatively new around here, we've done two VSEs in the past, both when schedules were getting out of control. One compiled our Best Cover Songs and the other listed our Best Soundtracks. In short, some stuff we wouldn't get to cover in a different way. And, by the way, these are pulled off without a guest.

Thinking in that direction for a theme, we present to you the Most Essential/Necessary Compilations. For Scot, this meant one thing: artists/bands who have produced basically no complete albums worth consideration of a full Political Beats episode, but who have a Greatest Hits/Best Of package that contains absolutely everything you need of the singles. Some people really hate buying hits packages because they want to have the artistic statement made by the full album. But you can’t deny there are some collections that are just perfect in their brevity/simplicity. All killer, no garbage album filler to worry about.

On the other hand, Jeff thought about this a little differently: What compilations helped introduce him to the larger work of a band? And, being a post-punk guy, which collections helped bind together swaths of material you can't find elsewhere?

In the end, as usual, you get two slightly different perspectives on the show. You can decide which one is superior.