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The episode Tim and Matt were made for, explaining movies via Dril tweets. If you don't know Dril, go open Twitter and have yourself a reading session. We rattle off a bunch of favorites, and Tim relays how this David Lean classic is really just a Dril gem, as are The Insider and The King of Comedy. Lean, Mann, and Scorsese makes this a heavy hitter directors episode, but have they captured the spirit of their times as elegantly as Dril?

Belle and Sebastian produced a truly marvelous set of mournful yet sweet songs on If You're Feeling Sinister, a niche that they still loom over 30 years later. You might call it earnest, or even (and Matt might fight you) twee, but we call in New Sincerity. Matt and Tim talk the David Foster Wallace of it all then focus on some other breathtakingly vulnerable and poignant albums by artists in their feelings, Broken Social Scene's You Forgot it in People and Cat Powers' Moon Pix.

The movie title announces but Tim questions, are these really The Best Years of Our Lives? What makes the years best or even meaningful? How do we live out our lives as best we can? It's freshmen philosophy time, baby, but with two unrelenting cynics who, nevertheless, believe in the power of narrative. Tim brings Groundhog Day and Meet Me in St. Louis for consideration, the former with it's one-liners and latter with some immortal tunes.

Another one of those episodes where Matt pretends to know anything about electronic music. Some fun ones here though, all classics of that late-90s shooting star genre Big Beat, which is blessedly straightforward in name. Chemical Brothers make it on the Spin list with Dig Your Own Hole, and Matt talks Fatboy Slim's You've Come a Long Way, Baby and Propellerheads' Decksanddrumsandrockandroll as progenitors and exemplum of the Big Beat sound and era.

At their cores, the guys (particularly Tim) exude Dad Energy. That's surely been evident this entire podcast, but it's heightened here when they get to talk about early 19th century American history, specifically the Monroe Doctrine. See how the West was metaphorically won, or vaguely claimed, in Missing and The Mosquito Coast.

Actually okay timing here with Drake having just released a new album. Matt won't "get" that one just like he doesn't "get" Take Care...or Lana Del Ray's Ultraviolence or Father John Misty's Pure Comedy. Decade defining artists of the 2010s all, and unequivocally absent from any of Matt's personal playlists or rankings. Listen to Matt and Tim embrace their inner Abe Simpson as they ponder how they once had "it" but then "it" changed under their feet.

Dr. Strangelove is as much a movie of incredible sight gags and one-liners as it is profound political commentary. Tim and Matt share their favorites, naturally, before Tim frames the film as the more successful Twin to a similar, proximate movie. He then considers William Wyler’s Jezebel and Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street in a similar vein, wondering what makes them more popular, successful, and ultimately lasting.

A whole host of albums on the docket in this one! Matt gives Tim the choice of two sets to be considered alongside Eric B. and Rakim’s stone-cold classic Paid in Full. (If you haven’t heard Eric B. and, especially, Rakim directly, you’ve heard them in other artists.) Tim chooses the DMX and Busta Rhymes route as Matt outlines their cases as foundational, formative acts in hip-hop.

The famous addition to the movie version of Sound of Music, "Something Good" speaks to that (realized) hope of doing something, anything helpful for others. Tim tracks that theme of I Must Have Done Something Good through Crossing Delancey (Joan Micklin Silver) and Manhunter (Michael Mann) and how that sentiment often lives somewhere between exhausted relief and neurotic yearning.

p.s. This episode was recorded before our hiatus, please ignore any dated references.

We love a good genre episode and here’s a big one from the 90s, which has influenced everything from Bjork to the theme song of House. Portishead’s Dummy sets the stage for the forlorn, downtempo, psychedelic mix of jazz, dub, and soul that is Trip-Hop. Neither Massive Attack nor Lamb has the secret ingredient that is Beth Gibbons, but both offer unique, compelling visions of Trip-Hop’s range with the former’s demented house beats in Mezzanine and the latter’s insistent break-beats in Lamb.

p.s. This episode was recorded before our hiatus, please ignore any dated references.

Tim is here doing serious things and giving some love to the old studio model of movie making along with the peak and power of MGM. Meanwhile, Matt is being a nudnik and subjecting Tim and everyone else to a ranking of Butt Rock songs. Where else can you hear about Naughty Marietta, Breaking Benjamin, various Mickey Rooney joints, and Staind all at once? Where else would you even want to?!

p.s. This episode was recorded before our hiatus, please ignore any dated references.

“It was beauty killed the beast.” So ends King Kong (1933), whom Matt and Tim love very much. A memorable last line goes a long way in establishing a film’s legacy, especially when it encapsulates the spirit of the film so perfectly. Tim looks at Back to the Future and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang as other instances of movies that tie a perfect bow on their journeys. (As a bonus, see how much Matt can annoy Tim with that Pretenders song.)

p.s. This episode was recorded before our hiatus, please ignore any dated references.

Matt is feeling his oats in this one and ready to confront you all with the legacies of Mumford and Sons and Nickelback. Vampire Weekend feel like a Matt band, but they aren't. What they undoubtedly are is a King of 21st Century Rock, emblematic of a larger genre movement. So, too, were Mumford and Nickelback. Love them or (most likely) hate them, they allow us to track the ebbs and flows of popular rock in the current century.

p.s. This episode was recorded before our hiatus, please ignore any dated references.

Though I would have appreciated the bit of running La La Land into this for no reason, Tim has standards. He's looking at the classic crime film as a Three Decade Period Piece. In other words, the movie released roughly three decades after the bit of history it covers. We're going to small town Indiana and big, seedy L.A. as we discuss Hoosiers and Farewell, My Lovely and consider the significance of time difference the same as our ages.

p.s. This episode was recorded before our hiatus, please ignore any dated references.

We're back after a long but necessary hiatus. And what better way to return than with....oh no. Welp, Kanye is back on the podcast, and even more treacherous than last we talked about him. Which is a shame, because College Dropout is a genuinely fun, and funny, album. With a clear potshot at Ye's recent history, Matt talks some albums that try to Make Hip-Hop Fun Again in Del tha Funky Homosapien's Both Sides of the Brain and Madvillain's Madvillainy (which also means this is the second pod appearance for the late, great MF DOOM).

p.s. We actually recorded this one before our hiatus, so ignore any dated references.

Tim loves a good chance to slag the AFI for choosing not actually American movies but we have a bit of nuance on that theme this episode. Tim looks at John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy as a prime example of a non-American director bringing some foreign style to American cinema. Consideration of two directors with highly distinct, and maybe even iconoclastic, styles follows with F.W. Murnau (Tabu) and Sergio Leone (Once Upon a Time in America).

Matt keeps the rock theme going and checks in on life after the extinction (read: reunion tours) of the dinosaurs. Sleater-Kinney lambast and reinvigorate rock all at once in The Woods, a totemic and virile nearly-closing statement from the band. Rock is always on the verge of death in the magazines yet forever vital in our hearts, and Matt looks to Queens of the Stone Age and The Darkness that, like Sleater-Kinney, carry the perpetually fading torch of rock music in the 21st century.

The Philadelphia Story, in addition to being an interesting early rom-com, reflects well on one of the great mid-century movie titans, MGM. Tim tracks the story - the rise and fall, the palace intrigue, the style and viewpoint - of MGM through the momentous The Philadelphia Story and two smaller features in Love Finds Andy Hardy by George B. Seitz and Tea and Sympathies by Vincente Minnelli. Tim also official declares himself a leading scholar of Andy Hardy studies, while he and Matt would both like short men to calm down and realized that miniscule Mickey Rooney was once married to Ava Gardner. 

I don't know that grunge killed Guns N' Roses so much as Guns N' Roses killed Guns N' Roses but, regardless, Appetite for Destruction lives on in radio waves and arenas everywhere. "Welcome to the Jungle," "Paradise City," and "Sweet Child of Mine" are pretty close to unkillable. They're also reflective of a different time in the pop landscape, a bigger and louder and more leathery time. A time When Dinosaurs Roamed, as is the theme for this episode considering the innovation and success of, along with Guns N' Roses, The Cult's Electric and Def Leppard's Hysteria. Throw up your best sign of the horns and bang your head, it's time to rock. 

We’re all trying to hold back the darkness these days, but the folks in these movies especially so. Tim takes quick stock of the most annoying child actors, then talks the dark circumstances surrounding the protagonists of Shane, Bringing Out the Dead, and Maria Full of Grace. A mysterious gunman, an ambulance driver, a drug mule all fighting to hold back the pain of the past and future. Plus one is Nicolas Cage.

The 2009 Grammys were weird as hell. Matt and Tim cover that weirdness in great depth before digging into the especially weird Best Album category. Robert Plant and Allison Krauss won that year, and Ne-Yo was there too. But Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter III gets the Spin nod here and man is he as odd as ever. After Weezy discussion, Matt goes fully in his bag and gets to talk about Radiohead’s In Rainbows and, finally, Coldplay and Viva La Vida. He’s got an uphill battle with Tim, tune in to see if he can pull off that Coldplay best exemplifies the 2009 of it all.

Anything that gets Tim and Matt close to Beefsquatch is dangerous, and Tim’s just not even trying to avert it here. Come for the Beefcake chants, stay for the measured and considered analysis of masculinity and gender performativity. Gaze upon the beefy males of It Happened One Night, The Swimmer, and The Vikings and question your own gendered expectations and the deep sadness of them all.

For all the Shoegaze lovers out there - and apparently you’re a sizeable contingency of our audience - here are three albums that are, at most, a stone’s throw from stuff featured in the My Blood Valentine and Shoegaze Decile episodes. Scottish alt-rockers The Jesus and Mary Chain debuted with Psychocandy in 1985 to massive and continued acclaim. All shiny melodies drenched in feedback, Psychocandy casts a long shadow of influence. Matt offers the similarly foundational Cocteau Twins and their 1990 album Heaven of Las Vegas and the David Lynch-approved 2012 effort from The Chromatics, Kill for Love.

A regular concern for Tim and Matt is the art of translating the stage into film, which so often goes awry. We’ve talked other instances of this in previous episodes, but Tim builds the whole ship out of Pulitzer Prize adaptations this time. Transforming the intimacy of the playhouse into the spectacle of the cinema is no easy feat, and a dying one at that. A Streetcar Named Desire remains the gold standard, by critical consensus anyway, yet remains an uncomfortable movie. Tim brings back Norman Jewison and Sidney Lumet for other examples of making the stage work on the screen with A Soldier’s Story and Long Day’s Journey Into Night, respectively.

“Get the point? Good, let’s dance.” Such is the ethos of Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814, a massive and eminently funky album which, along with Jackson’s Control, helped define and kick off New Jack Swing. Teddy Riley, who was instrumental to the New Jack Swing sound, describes the genre as “a new kid on the block who’s swinging it,” which Matt takes as a guiding star for how Karyn White’s self-titled album and Bell Biv DeVoe’s Poison come out swinging in more ways than one. We talk the actual music signifiers of New Jack Sing, an astounding Archer joke, the art socially conscious balladry, and try to wrest Janet Jackson from bad faith Super Bowl connotations.

We joke about how when the Podcat looks out the window he’s watching TV and, well, that’s more or less what’s happening in Rear Window! Hitchcock really knew how to wrestle profundity out of a kind of silly concept. After Matt and Tim investigate and learn some interesting Manhattan  geography, Tim outlines Scopophilia, or the love of looking, and how it operates in Tod Browning’s Freaks and David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. Good psychological concept and three movies interested in the horror of the everyday, you love to see it.

After a good conversation about P.J. Harvey and her cattle experience, Matt and Tim talk the blunt force marvel that is Rid of Me. 30 years in, Harvey remains a titan with an immense shadow of influence, which sets up the somewhat cheeky theme of Canon Fodder. Matt looks at two other artists he thinks have a great shot at being canonized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (a fun if sort of functionally unimportant honor) and what styles and influences they filter through their own artistry: St. Vincent’s Strange Mercy and Sharon Van Etten’s Are We There.

Part 1 is an album to illegal to stream. Part 2 has a movie with a director too tarnished to love. Intolerance serves as the D.W. Griffith cut-out on the AFI list given The Birth of a Nation is more trouble than it’s worth at this point. As it’s poster says, Intolerance is “colossal spectacle,” and Tim guides us through the ways in which it’s a Film School standout. He excites Matt a whole lot too with two genre movies in Forbidden Planet and Night of the Living Dead, both of which are technical marvels.

Welcome to the episode with the hardest album to find! De La Soul’s seminal 3 Feet High and Rising is, notoriously, not streaming given the legal mess of its remarkable amount of samples. Matt’s fully in his bag here talking the construction of music and interrogating what music entails. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of Assemblage as a concept and process, then talk the legacy and impact of 3 Feet High and Rising, the joyous muchness of The Avalanches’ Since I Left You, and the radical franken-music of Amon Tobin’s Foley Room.

It’s a good question! The AFI will have to deal with the 21st century more at some point; Fellowship of the Ring certainly has a case, though. Tim and Matt talk the trilogy in general, then Tim makes the big case for Fellowship, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, and Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life. (This is Malick’s final appearance in what has been a wonderful running bit.) Tune in to see where we plant our GOAT flags!

One of the earliest albums on the Spin list (January 1985), Husker Du’s New Day Rising proves a fun favorite for both Matt and Tim. We talk the band’s place in the Our Band Could Be Your Life of it all (i.e. 80s punk and early hardcore) and their sonic take on the line “it aggravates and it pacifies.” Matt brings two post-hardcore darlings to the table in Cursive and Thursday and talks abrasive music and catharsis.

Been 10 episodes, which means it’s time for another bonus pod. In this decile, Matt takes inspiration from the discussion of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as an album given particular significance from it’s proximity to 9/11. Rather than looking at the “most” 9/11 albums, though, he instead ranks the actual releases on 9/11, which was banger of an album day including the likes of Jay-Z, Bob Dylan, Mariah Carey, and Nickelback. Tim, meanwhile, looks at the art of the Remake, which includes discussion of The Mummy (1999) and Ben-Hur (1925). We also have a fun time remembering who stars in one of those movies…

Topical! Recorded before Spielberg dropped his but nonetheless weary of the impending discourse. After necessary, and sadly topical, love for Stephen Sondheim and quick rankings from Tim and Matt both, Tim clamors down the fire escape away from the usual West Side Story talking points to talk love in weird places and doomed circumstances with Desert Hearts and They Live by Night.

You know him, you could just as easily love or hate him, and you have to respect his technique. (Technique I say! Not content.) As a bonafide Suburban White Boy Matt has a lot of Eminem thoughts and love. He traipses through how hard it is to like Eminem, why he probably shouldn’t, and then gushes about Em’s craft as well as the mind-bending work of Aesop Rock and MF DOOM.

Tim is getting technical today, looking at vibrant (and lurid) weaponizations of Color Cinematography. Taxi Driver might be gritty in general, but it along with The Hunt for Red October and Niagra show us a different way from the dull, brown, arid cinematography of modern blockbusters.

After awhile of hand-wringing about the importance of Wilco’s magnum opus,  Matt settles in on the deconstructive and experimental bent of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. (He’s also sorely tempted by the 9/11 significance of it all, but stay tuned for more on that!) Bonny Light Horseman’s updated folk standards go toe-to-toe with Ben Howard’s moody and destabilizing landscapes in this battle of deeply felt and Impressionistic albums.

Two things of note here. First, our (somehow) first ever play-in Sub Title! Tim pits two versions of Father of the Bride against one another and Matt decides which gets to face The Birdcage. Second, I’m not sure there’s been a bigger tonal shift between entry and Sub Title options before. The violence and despair of The Deer Hunter gives way to the hilarity of Steve Martin, Martin Short, Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, and Hank Azaria in shoes.

Korn famously (notoriously) insisted that their musical lineage starts with Red Hot Chili Peppers and Faith No More. More generally, their history begins in alt rock of the late 80s and early 90s, an era of experimentation, forceful expansion, and quite a bit of weirdness. The Chili Peppers aren’t in this episode, but Matt appreciates the violent ache of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral before considering how Jane’s Addiction and Faith No More broke the alt rock mold(s) in their own unique ways.

A disproportionate amount of this episode is Matt railing on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, which features one of the worst people in his estimation. Tim keeps things fair and moving though in his analysis of M*A*S*H* as a movie about terrible people maybe sorta learning to be not as terrible before talking Ferris, where no one learns a damn thing, and Five Came Back, where a lot of people learn some hard things they’d really rather not. Listen to hear which is the worst of them all in some productive way.

Remember the aughts when most indie music was dance-y? Good times? Good times. Innocuous times, if we believe the worry of one James Murphy who warns as much on the opening of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver. Matt looks at the legacy, longevity, and punchiness, or lack thereof, of Murphy’s totem of an album. Up as replacements are Phoenix’s gargantuanly popular Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix and Hot Chip’s prickly, but no less beloved, The Warning where both are judged by their handling of emotional profundity and innocuous dance rock.

Tim and Matt have shown previous interest in naming the “Most” of various things - most 00’s, 90’s, and 80’s songs, for example. The things that best embody and symbolize an era or genre or concept. Tim returns that thought experiment here with three movies that are the Most their respective directors. North by Northwest has all the Hitchcock you know and expect, while Moby Dick and My Darling Clementine distill John Huston and John Ford, respectively, as much as they tell actual stories. But which Auteur is truest to themselves?

Tell us which option you would have chose, vote in our poll below!

Last week was Myth and History; this week is the Cosmos. The Moon and Antarctica, an album near and dear to Matt’s heart, tries to speak (with) God with layers of guitar in a Cosmos entirely of Modest Mouse’s design. Built to Spill, MM’s Pacific Northwest counterparts, and Hum, of Shoegaze Decile fame, have similarly searching and vast 90s albums in Perfect From Now On and You’d Prefer and Astronaut, respectively. One is more metaphysical and the other more astrological, both, however, investigate the stars of the universe.

Tell us which option you would have chosen, vote in our poll below! 

Tim, as is his wont, is working with another AFI list here in 100 Years…100 Thrills, a list that he and Matt decide is truly bonkers but in a charming way. Jaws - which, hey, good film - lands number 2nd on that list. The Exorcist is 3rd, which is the first Sub option since Tim can actually watch it now. And while Tim can’t use the movie in 1st, Psycho, he looks to another Hitchcock film, Notorious, in this battle of thrills, both the spectacular and the horrifying.

Kendrick Lamar’s Good Kid, M.A.A.D. City is probably the most widely beloved and respected debut from 2010s hip-hop, and which Kendrick album is his best is a Discourse deserving of the capital letter. Matt doesn’t wade into that, rather he considers GK, MC for the autobiographical origin story that it is, Kendrick’s concept album about the creation of Kendrick Lamar. Danny Brown’s Old and Lupe Fiasco’s The Cool go toe-to-toe in this episode about Concept Rap albums with a bent towards self-creation.

Y’all remember Rocky loses in the first one, right? Well Tim and Matt are here to remind you - and remind you why that’s a good thing - and Tim is being the depressing one this week when he talks about The Cincinnati Kid and Make Way for Tomorrow, two movies where loss looms large and some everyday folks are working hard to survive. Everyone loses, but who loses most meaningfully?

This is the first recorded episode after that summer break we took, so forgive any ring rust. No better way to get revved back up than with our favorite band to hate: Pavement. We say things about Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain (we like it more! I think! Kinda!). Then Matt introduces Tim to two bands that draw on Pavement’s style. Speedy Ortiz’s Major Arcana and Cymbal’s Eat Guitars’ LOSE vie for indie rock supremacy while, crucially, not being mistaken for Pavement’s sound.

The sweetness of Chaplin making dinner rolls dance shines in The Gold Rush, and gives Tim his jumping off point for this episode. Things escalate quite a bit as we move from dancing bread to two antagonists realizing a secret, anonymous letter writing love, to dinosaurs and the sins of science. In each Tim finds moments of beauty and wonder. Tune in to see how he pitches all this to Matt, grumpy skeptic of most things happy.

Few things get Matt more excited than concept records and jarring indie music. Put the two together and you have In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel’s classic that’s beloved, hated on, called overrated, and beloved again in regular cycles. Anais Mitchell and Hurray for the Riff Raff aren’t as, well, batshit as NMH, but their albums Hadestown and The Navigator, respectively, are historical and mythological records much like In the Aeroplane. Listen to see which allegories Tim likes best.

Years from now, when historians and cultural anthropologists analyze the vital impact of Sub Titles, they’ll look to this episode for the self-evident truth of Tim’s proselytizing for Nashville as well as the origins of our then world famous band Musie and the Beef. It’s all business as usual, I guess I’m saying, to the point that here comes the lit crit terminology too as Tim discusses Diegetic Musicals. The Faustian insanity of Brian de Palma’s Phantom of the Paradise runs into the muted melancholy (and John Goodman) of the Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis.

Have you, too, been wondering why Matt isn’t talking about more 90s Grocery Store Rock canon bands? Lucky for you he’s got just the stuff you need this episode! After talking M.I.A.’s Kala, how it holds up almost 15 years later, and the inescapability of “Paper Planes,” Matt moves to talk about two bands with some equally pervasive hits with famous movie connections. That’s right, it’s time for Dave Matthews Band and Goo Goo Dolls.