Jokermen

Jokermen is a music podcast in which Evan and Ian work through the records of Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, album after album. The talk is conversational and the jokes come quickly. In 'Brian Wilson: NO PIER PRESSURE' the pair reach the second-to-last Brian Wilson album in the run, and they turn the word penultimate into a pun. The verdict that follows is fond and unsparing at the same time. One voice argues that Brian in 2015 was never going to succeed as a contemporary pop artist, so the project was misbegotten from the start. The Brian Wilson band still gets real credit. The playing on many songs is called very nice and almost entirely successful, apart from a few production choices. A song like 'Whatever Happened' is graded in baseball terms. It is nothing spectacular, the verdict goes, but it is a solid single, maybe a double, the kind of hit that advances runners. Catchiness gets the same treatment: one song is said to stick in the head the way tar on the beach sticks to a foot. That habit of putting honest criticism inside wordplay is the clearest reason to spend time with the show. It is loyal to its subject, but it never treats loyalty as a reason to praise. The feed goes well beyond album talk. Interview episodes run under an 'In Conversation' banner. 'In Conversation: BRUCE HORNSBY' was recorded ahead of the release of Hornsby's record Indigo Park, which the introduction describes as the kind of album that comes from an artist who is in it for the love of the game. 'In Conversation: CARL NEWMAN' is more personal: Ian explains that Newman's band was a big one for his dad, and he credits that family listening with his own interest in rock songs. Film gets a turn too, in a movie episode that asks how the 2014 biopic Love & Mercy compares with more recent music biopics. The country side of the feed appears in 'Gary Stewart: I Am From The Honky Tonks' with Jimmy McDonough, where honky-tonks are described as low-stage bars built around jukeboxes and songs about drinking and cheating. In that episode one speaker remembers Gary, guitar in hand, singing inches from his face in a double-wide trailer and holding nothing back. Some titles are marked 'Teaser', including 'Teaser // Mike Love: UNLEASH THE LOVE + 12 SIDES OF SUMMER + MIKE LOVE, NOT WAR', whose opening banter jokes that the episode is insurance against anyone saying the show did not try hard enough. Near the close of the NO PIER PRESSURE episode, the end of the Beach Boys series is pictured as a sunset over the ocean, with the pair either wiped out or drifting sweetly into the night, depending on how you look at it.