Political Beats

Scot and Jeff discuss Sleater-Kinney with Nic Rowan.

Introducing the Band:

Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Nic Rowan. Nic is managing editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal. You can follow him on Twitter/x @NicXTempore. 

Nic’s Music Pick: Sleater-Kinney

When people talk about the greatest American rock bands of the past 30 years, the conversation usually starts in familiar places (we might say Spoon around these parts). But sooner or later, it ought to arrive at a discussion of Sleater-Kinney. The band, named after Sleater Kinney Road in Washington near Interstate 5, formed in the Pacific Northwest during the explosion of the riot grrrl movement. Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and, eventually, Janet Weiss built a sound that was fiercely intelligent without being pretentious and musically adventurous without ever losing sight of the hook. Their records are packed with jagged guitars, knotty rhythms, and thrilling vocal interplay, all delivered with an urgency that never feels manufactured. 

Part of what makes Sleater-Kinney such a compelling subject is that they're difficult to pigeonhole. They're often introduced first as an important feminist band, or a cornerstone of riot grrrl, or a political band, and all of those descriptions contain some truth. But they can also obscure the bigger picture. Strip away the labels, and what's left is an extraordinary rock band, one with a distinctive musical language and an uncanny ability to make tension sound exhilarating. 

Over the course of a remarkable run, the band continually reinvented itself without abandoning its identity. Dig Me Out and One Beat get universal praise on this show, while there's great debate over the generally well-regarded The Woods. And what to make of the comeback after a decade away? We trace that entire journey and discuss why Sleater-Kinney remains one of the essential bands of modern American rock.

If you know them, you know why they matter. If you don’t, you’re about to find out. Join us for a deep look at the music and career of Sleater-Kinney.

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Scot and Jeff discuss the second part of XTC’s career (1984-2000) with Andrew Gretes.

Introducing the Band:

Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Andrew Gretes. Andrew is a fiction writer teaching creative rhetoric at Georgetown and George Washington University. You can find his work at andrewgretes.com.

Andrew’s Music Pick: XTC, Pt. 2

Awaken you dreamers! A month after we took you through the first part of XTC’s career – an Argonaut-like journey across the world of postpunk and pop during the end of the Seventies and the start of the Eighties – we return to pick up the story where we left off in 1984: with a psychologically landlocked band (songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding as well as guitarist Dave Gregory), now forever off the road and consigned to a studio, forced to make the most of their remaining careers without fears of an audience to either drag them down or lift them up.

And aside from the Beatles, it is little exaggeration to say that no studio-bound act ever made quite as much out of such a fate as XTC – though they didn’t make much money, naturally. Instead they made great art, with a series of increasingly ambitious pop albums (including 1986’s Skylarking, which you might even have heard of) that reflected the expanding musical palates and melodic ambitions of Partridge and Moulding. 

The first episode of this two-part series proudly featured some of the weirdest, most clashingly irregular sounds of the Seventies. This second features some of the most awe-striking beauty you’ve probably never heard. From their mainstream career (which rarely if ever sold) to their moonlight lark as the Dukes of Stratosphear (which sold gangbusters until people realized they were buying XTC music) Partridge, Moulding and Gregory never quit stuffing every single song they recorded with meaning and melody, and the results are an overwhelming trove of musical riches to discover – one you might only be vaguely aware even exists

Political Beats has been building up to its XTC episodes ever since the day the podcast was founded. The second part of their story is every bit as impressive – and different – as the first. Settle in and listen to us sing a happy-sad ballad about the greatest band in popular music to never quite make it. Oh my, oh my, don’t it make you wanna cry?

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Scot and Jeff discuss the first part of XTC’s career (1977-1983) with Andrew Gretes.

 

Introducing the Band:

Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Andrew Gretes. Andrew is a fiction writer teaching creative rhetoric at Georgetown and George Washington University. You can find his work at andrewgretes.com.

Andrew’s Music Pick: XTC

There may be no language in our lungs to tell the world just how we feel about this band, but here we give you a three-hour explanation -- with many clips to illustrate where words fail -- why XTC is arguably the great lost group of the rock era. In the early Seventies, in a rural English nowheresville named Swindon, songwriters Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding got together with local drum-thwacker Terry Chambers to form a local trio with decidedly quirky, non-chart sensibilities. Later they were joined by keyboardist Barry Andrews and began to slowly build a national profile in the (by then) post-punk scene. And only slightly later than that, they decided they were interested in developing those chart sensibilities after all -- but without dropping even one bit of their quirk. 

But the story of this band is best told by their music -- and it’s practically criminal that it isn’t universally celebrated this world over. A decades-long career filled with nothing but one sparklingly intelligent post-punk and pop gem after another, XTC was always out of step with their times, always resolutely unassimilable to the true mainstream, always just a bit too self-consciously thoughtful. 

And eventually they made their grudging peace with it, resigned to always be that “great” group that might have scored a hit or two, might have bubbled around the Top 20 every few years or so during the 1980s, but whose impact was heard in the countless subsequent groups they influenced. The story of XTC is a musical tale that will inspire anyone who cares about true songcraft, one filled with immense optimism and joy as well as some of the bitterest sociological observations to be put into British song. 

Political Beats has been building up to its XTC episodes (this is the first of two) ever since the day the podcast was founded. The second part of their story is every bit as impressive -- and different -- as the first. All hail the amazing crash-boom-band.

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Scot and Jeff discuss The Apples in Stereo with Jack Butler.

Introducing the Band:

Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) with guest Jack Butler. Jack is deputy editor for Free Expression, a new newsletter about politics and culture from the Wall Street Journal opinion page. Previously he was submissions editor for National Review Online. You can follow him on Twitter/x @jackbutler4815. And unless you're a 2:30 marathoner, you probably can't follow him in real life — unless he lets you. 

Jack’s Music Pick: The Apples in Stereo

Get ready for sunshine melodies, fuzzed-out guitars, and pure pop sweetness, because we’re diving into the colorful world of The Apples in Stereo. On this episode, we walk through the band’s discography album by album, tracing how Robert Schneider and company blended psychedelia, power pop, and a DIY spirit into a signature sound. You might not be familiar with the band (yet), but you know the influences -- The Beatles, ELO, XTC, Pavement, Guided by Voices, The Beach Boys.

We travel from the lo-fi charm of Fun Trick Noisemaker to the "space disco" feel of Travellers in Space and Time. Along the way, Scot takes the proper time to pay tribute to an all-time favorite album, New Magnetic Wonder, and we discuss the unorthodox ways the band found its way into children’s programming. Plus Hilarie Sidney gets her due as an excellent and underrated singer, songwriter, and drummer. 

Schneider’s interest in science, space, and sound influenced the band’s later work specifically, with conceptual elements and unconventional recording approaches shaping their music. New Magnetic Wonder even touts Schneider's invention of a new musical scale: the "Non-Pythagorean scale" (he’s now a mathematics professor at Michigan Tech University, so it all makes sense in the end). 

Throughout the years, the band kept pushing forward without losing a sense of wonder and experimentation that defined their earliest work and refined their ability to create hooks and melodies that lodge inside your brain for weeks at a time. And you can’t tell the story of The Apples in Stereo without diving into the world of the Elephant 6 Recording Company, the loose collective of like-minded musicians that helped spark an indie-pop movement in the ’90s. Jack takes the lead in describing this element of the show.

This episode is a celebration of melody, creativity, and the joy of making something delightfully strange. It’ll fill you with energy. Can you feel it?

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Scot and Jeff discuss Deep Purple with Ivan Pongracic.

Introducing the Band:

Your hosts Scot Bertram (@ScotBertram) and Jeff Blehar (@EsotericCD) are joined by guest Ivan Pongracic, William E. Hibbs & Ludwig von Mises professor of Economics at Hillsdale College. Ivan has a career nearly as storied as Deep Purple’s -- a 1984 immigrant from the former Yugoslavia (Croatia, specifically), an accomplished professional surf guitarist, and now economics professor at Hillsdale.

Ivan’s Music Pick: Deep Purple

Get your jackhammers out boys, it’s time to carve the story of rock into a mountainside. Yes, Deep Purple went through many evolutions during their career (which still persists to this day), but what they will forever be synonymous with -- in the best possible way -- is bone-crunching, riff-driven hard rock. 

The gang -- Ivan and Jeff especially -- argue that Deep Purple was in fact the platonic ideal of whatever it is we’ve come to apply the broad label of “hard rock” to over the past half-century: compulsively driven, secretly smart music that combined steady beats and metallic shredding with formal (and often British-inspired) commitment to structure and hooks. Deep Purple may have gone through a goofy -- and shockingly interesting -- embryonic phase as Vanilla Fudge-like pop crooners, but when they finally emerged with Deep Purple in Rock (1970) they created a template that legions of bands would slavishly dedicate themselves to imitating (not least of all Spinal Tap, whose story is largely theirs, remixed). 

You know them from “Smoke on the Water.” Maybe you’ve heard that song about space truckin’ ‘round the stars. What we’re here to prove to you today is that Deep Purple is so much more than what you might have casually heard. In their unpretentious, hard-driving way, they provided the matrix of countless bands that followed after them, and all for the better. Click play and become the speed king you always wanted to be.

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