The Dismemberment Plan
Emergency & I (Reissue)
Barsuk Records
Rating: 9.5/10
(This review originally appeared on Audiosuede)
Review after the jump.
Emergency & I, the 1999 indie rock classic from Washington D.C. post-post-punk band the Dismemberment Plan, will be turning twelve years old this year. Twelve fucking years old. This prior Tuesday, Barsuk Records released the seminal record in an double LP Special Edition version, full of comprehensive D-Plan stories and unreleased tracks. The whole package serves purpose for completionists, die hard fans, and newcomers alike. And hell, that seems like as good of an excuse as any to take a retrospective look back at one of this generation's formative records.
For a kid who went through some of his teenage years with the album as a guidebook, it makes me feel old, but it also makes me feel a little special. Yeah, there's a special edition coming out now, but there was something about living with this music in and around the time of its creation that-- elitist as it seems-- it made you a member of some exclusive club. It was a club where we took these songs too seriously and not seriously at all, laughing at the parts that weren't jokes and nodding sadly along to the ones that were.
There's that whole cliche about how "Album X would sound as fresh coming out today as it did when it first blah blah blah." I don't know if that's necessarily true with Emergency & I. Part of it is simply fact; the proliferation of the Internet, the melting pot approach to even the simplest genres, means Emergency no longer sounds as wildly foreign as it did when it was released. Part of it is probably the emotional connection I share with the record, and how inextricably it is tied to a very specific time in my life.
But make no mistake, when people first heard the Dismemberment Plan's third record, it sounded like future music. The way it threw together Bad Brains and Television with funk and old-school hip-hop, the balance it struck between wild frenzies of energy and maudlin meditation, how Eric Axelson's bass was as much R&B as it was indie rock, and Joe Easley's mind blowing, polyrhythmic attack of the skins was both D.C. indie muscle and East Coast rap groove, all of that combined into something that sounded both comforting and alien, but understandable and inconceivable. Ten years ago, when I first heard "Memory Machine," I thought it sounded like it came from the future it was describing.
I dusted off my Emergency & I mp3s recently, and what I hear now isn't that futurism, or anything particularly groundbreaking in regard to current musical context. Instead what I hear is a band who had an undeniable gift for melody, a love for both augmenting and dissecting those melodies with tension-wire guitars and keyboard phasers set to stun. I hear a band that was subtly genius at arranging a pop song; listen to the climaxes of "The City" or "A Life of Possibilities" again, they hit with the kind of power that every big name pop producer hopes to find. I hear a band that wasn't afraid to splice their cotton candy melodies with explosions of nervous anxiety; how "Gyroscope"'s time signature never stays in one place; how "8 1/2 Minutes" ping pongs between its anthemic chorus and its frenetic verses; how all that melancholy comes to a furious boil in frenetic eruptions like "I Love a Magician" and "Girl O'Clock."
One thing that's lost in this out-of-context reminder of the Dismemberment Plan's '99 record is just how unexpected the album was. The D-Plan's first two records were impressive, with their angular, dissonant guitar riffs and unhinged-- sometimes to the point of (intentional) comedy-- wild man kineticism, but they always seemed to be ashamed of their pop sensibilities and their weary worldview. Emergency & I saw them accepting both with open arms, and becoming a stronger band for it. Gone were the petulant "Academy Award" condescensions, replaced with brutal honesty, arranged by Travis Morrison into funny, mature, painful, and poignant allegories.
Morrison on Emergency & I is the master of the allegory. "A Life of Possibilities" is ostensibly about a man digging through the Earth to find an unfamiliar land on the other side, becoming a universally familiar story about moving away from what you know only to be frightened and uncertain by the new world you encounter. "You Are Invited"'s subspace party invitation for anyone to do anything for all time reveals a man who has been to a few parties too many, and is tired of what he sees. "I Love a Magician" is simply a tale of a man in love with a girl who uses that love to control him. They're not advanced ideas, but the absolutely original way Morrison presents them makes them more affecting and more harrowing.
The last track on Emergency & I is called "Back and Forth," and it features Morrison basically rocking spoken word poetry over probably the most uplifting Dismemberment Plan backing track ever written. It's appropriate and it's necessary. The horrific sinking feeling of songs like "The Jitters" and "Spider in the Snow", the anxious energy of "8 1/2 Minutes" and "What Do You Want Me To Say?", the doomsaying of "Memory Machine" and "You Are Invited," all needed some form of release. "Back and Forth" is that, the light at the end of a tunnel that wasn't necessarily dimly lit, but the graffiti on the wall wasn't even worth looking at, the fluorescent tubes hurt your eyes, the huddled hopeless masses saw you as one of your own. But even being through all of that, you can still raise your hands in the air and wave them like you just don't care.
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