Episode 139: Peter Suderman / Dismemberment Plan

Political Beats

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.