Staff Picks: A music history show and an animated series that flips the bird at Nazis
This week, TV Editor Tim Lowery and Staff Writer William Hughes provide some help with your 2025 pop culture resolutions via recommendations for a music-listening companion show and the opening salvo of the new DC Universe.
“The Walter Martin Radio Hour” (Substack)
Listening to people who really love music talk off the cuff about the music they love is one of my favorite pastimes. And, with that in mind, “The Walter Martin Radio Hour,” in which the eponymous host—a solo artist and member of The Walkmen and Jonathan Fire*Eater—feels like it’s made just for me. Each week, Martin brings in records from his collection—many of them old, some of them crackly—plays them, chats a bit about them (a good amount of these observations boil down to simply an enthusiastic “Isn’t that great? I just love that one”), and presents them under a loose theme. (The show airs on Sunday evenings on Amsterdam, New York’s WEXT, and episodes drop on his Substack each Friday.)
“The Walter Martin Radio Hour” only started last May, but it’s already become a weekly essential for me. A big reason has to do with Martin’s tastes, which are both catholic—touching on everything from proto-punk and ’50s teen vocal groups to solo classical compositions and jazz (with lots of talk of Bob Dylan peppered throughout)—but clearly from the same guy who tends to gravitate towards songs for a lot of the same gut-instinct reasons. In this time when so much of musical history is instantly available, it can be pretty overwhelming trying to dig into the past, and I find myself regularly adding old songs from this show that are new to me to my monthly Spotify playlists.
But his casual presentation and the show’s parameters are big draws, too: Martin doesn’t research before or during his broadcasts, so any thoughts on a record or its history come from either whatever trivia is stored in the back of his head or what’s written on the liner notes on the LP in front of him. And as a host, he’s noticeably casual, coming off like a self-deprecating guy you met at the bar who you really enjoy—rather than politely stomach—hearing sound off on, say, the drumming brilliance of Charlie Watts.
Case in point: A recent Christmas episode opened with Thelonious Monk’s “By And By (We’ll Understand It Better By And By),” with Martin ad-libbing the following:
Listening to him play it straight sounds particularly nice knowing how 99.99-percent of the time he’s not playing it straight. It reminds me of when David Lynch did The Straight Story, you know? What a beautiful movie. And it was such a…I hate when people say the word “flex,” but it kind of was. It was just David Lynch saying, “Yeah, I can make a normal movie. I know how to make a beautiful, knock-your-socks-off, normal, emotional movie.”
The idea of diving into Monk feels overwhelming to me, but this lovely song and Martin’s relaxed, good-hang thoughts on it, act as a nice, unsnobby nudge to finally take that plunge. [Tim Lowery]
Creature Commandos (Max)
I usually describe myself as being hot-or-cold on James Gunn—which, when I think about it for a minute, really just means I like most everything he’s done except for Guardians Of The Galaxy. I’ve written before about Gunn’s weirder, non-franchise superhero work, and how it explores, in less smarmy fashion, the tropes that made him a Marvel superstar: fuck-ups who are better than they think they are, cracking quips and making good while soundtracked by a guy with razor-sharp instincts for an effective needle drop. It’s made all of his DC Comics work to date—first 2021’s The Suicide Squad, and then the genuinely great Peacemaker—land for me, and now it’s why I find myself hooked on Gunn’s new Max series Creature Commandos.
Sure, I rolled my eyes a bit when the show’s opening credits included an animated version of the man himself, typing away at his laptop—an acknowledgement from someone involved in the show’s production that Gunn himself has become a salable brand. But the series itself is proving to be a genuine blast. The concept of expendable heroes grotesquely gunning down even-more expendable mooks has always played to Gunn’s gross-out roots, and he’s clearly having a ton of fun playing around in the weirder corners of DC’s toolbox, forming a team that features Nazi-killing robots, a radioactive sociopath, and the Bride (i.e., of Frankenstein). As is so often the case with its creator’s work, there’s just enough feeling underpinning the jokes and head explosions to give the series emotional heft; a flashback structure for each episode allows even absurd characters like insane animal man The Weasel to get a layer of actual depth. (It doesn’t hurt that the voice cast is uniformly great, with Alan Tudyk especially giving a standout performance as the vile Dr. Phosphorus.)
Mostly, though, it’s just fun: quick-moving, brightly colored, and funny, with characters who are generally indestructible enough that you don’t have to worry about too much bad stuff happening to them—and antagonists both evil and dopey enough that you don’t have to feel bad when they get a molten middle finger shoved through their faces. If Gunn is driving toward a deeper point with a show that has been touted (slightly embarrassingly) as the first installment of “his” DC universe, it hasn’t revealed itself in the show’s first five episodes. What I have found is a reliable way to chill out each week, enjoying watching the bad guys explode, and the “good” guys look cool while doing it. [William Hughes]