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10

Best New Reissue

  • Genre:

    Rock

  • Label:

    Barsuk

  • Reviewed:

    January 11, 2011

One of the all-time great indie rock records is reissued in 2xLP form, with new liner notes and an extra disc of rare tracks.

The liner notes for the reissue of the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I come as an oral history: interviews with the band, label types, and D.C. scene staples, touching on everything from the death of singer Travis Morrison's father shortly before the album's conception to the band's oft-repeated, ill-conceived goal to cross-pollinate Radiohead and De La Soul. Among the best bits is Morrison's story of sketching the album's now-famous cover on his computer, then showing it off to skeptical friends. "People would just stare at me," he remembers. "It's a weird image. I've seen people with tattoos of it in the last few years."

To a certain segment of indie kids, many now indie adults, branding ourselves permanently with that weird sunset scene seems no stranger than an older dude's Black Flag bars or a youngster's Funeral laptop wallpaper. To many, Emergency & I, first released in 1999, is that record; breakup balm, to be sure, but also the voice in your head, the thing that seems to say as much about us as we know about ourselves. Though its influence on music at large has been difficult to chart, if we're to gauge a work's import by what it's meant to the people that come across it, Emergency & I is one of indie's key LPs. Its songs-- nervy, cacophonous, uncomfortably real-- actually mean something to people, whether they came to the record recently or have been letting it run through their lives for the last decade and change.

The history of Emergency & I isn't contained in the particulars of Eric Axelson's bass tone, or the band's brush-up with Interscope, or how much they liked Brainiac, or what was or wasn't going on in D.C. in the late 1990s. That stuff is just the prelude. Fact is, the history of Emergency & I lies with the people; people who hear too much of themselves in "The Jitters", who've vented spleen to the tune of "What Do You Want Me to Say?", who've cast off all shackles to the strains of "Back and Forth". Morrison claims not to grasp the significance of the album's title, but it's always seemed fairly obvious to me: There's the encroaching chaos of modern life-- the emergency-- and then there's you, standing outside it, yet inextricably linked. Emergency & I is a record about learning how to live with both.

Better than anyone, Morrison captures that awful, driftless, locked-up feeling you back yourself into sometimes; bored at work, unlucky in love, low on friends, lower on prospects. You're unsure where to move, be it another city or into another room, or whether either is worth the effort; that feeling, so perfectly articulated in "The City", that "something seems to happen somewhere else," yet for reasons financial and social and geographical alike, you're powerless to do anything about it. Call it self-insult to existential injury: You're so down, you start counting yourself out. That's "Spider in the Snow", in which a change of scenery still means the "same VCR, the same cats"; the same rut. That's "Memory Machine", in which eternal life seems little more than an excuse to chain-smoke. That, especially, is "The Jitters", in which our sick and sad protagonist can't bring himself to do much more than 10,000 push-ups a day.

But allowing himself to wallow or pointing fingers at everyone but himself, Morrison assesses the situation, turns over the problems in his head, sorts out what's in his control and what's out of it, and moves along. He sometimes invents elaborate metaphysical devices-- the all-access pass of "You Are Invited", the memory machine of "Memory Machine"-- to explain away what a more rational observation couldn't, but he's a strikingly realistic, austere lyricist, detailing just how dull feeling like crap can be, encouraging action even when he's not so certain he can manage it himself. He's not striving for perfection, just normalcy. That's struggle enough.

All this, Morrison delivers deftly, elastically, switching up cadence to match the mood. In 2011, an indie rock frontman copping to liking rap doesn't merit mention, but Morrison's MC-inspired delivery was and is rather novel; his voice alone is just a few notches above merely okay, yet he's never less than a commanding presence on the mic, able to pull off sharp tone-switches and jutting asides with the unusual clarity of a guy who's picked up just as much from Rakim as Ian MacKaye. Drummer Joe Easley's gifts are immediately apparent, his beefy, hyperkinetic style owing as much to dusty rock royalty as the then-contemporary drum'n'bass the band were clearly keen on. Axelson's basswork is unparalleled in both speed and tone. Jason Caddell's guitar weaves in and out of the tunes; they're a rock band, but not a guitar band per se, and Caddell's reserve is a big reason why they rarely get lumped in with the glut of D.C.'s spazzy post-hardcore contemporaries. And that woozy synth, a frequent presence throughout Emergency, beautifully echoes the weary resolve of Morrison's lyrics. Nearly as much as his voice and their explosive rhythm section, that keyboard smear is the sound of Emergency & I.

The Plan's melodic sense was unusual, borderline dissonant, and their arrangements curiously spare and well-considered. It's a busy record but never cluttered; weird but not altogether alien; lush and constantly transmogrifying. It is a perfectly realized sound-- difficult if not impossible to imitate. Not even the band itself ever quite sounded like this anywhere else. As the liners explain, at some point during the sessions, all assembled parties came to the realization that what they were working on was really something special. The reissue comes with a smattering of enjoyable singles, but even the best of those-- the barnstorming "B.O.B." rewrite "The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich"-- feels thin and frenzied next to the vibrant, remarkably self-assured Emergency & I material.

That tension between musical perfection and lyrical uncertainty is the heart of Emergency & I; here you have these incredibly exacting musicians playing this gorgeous, frantic, hyperstylized pop who then let some neurotic chart his insecurities over top. And yet the two disparate sides form an electrifying symbiosis. The music seems to alchemize around Morrison's lyrics, throbbing and melting to match the mood: "The Jitters" is the most downtrodden in tone and tempo alike, steady closer "Back and Forth" echoes a kind of acceptance with the state of things, frantic Brainiac hat-tip "Girl O'Clock" feels like the murderous sexual frustration it depicts. "8 1/2 Minutes" is positively apocalyptic, its whirring keyboards and Axelson's humongous bass runs akin to sonic blitzkrieg, and while the world ends around him, all Morrison can talk about is how beautiful it is. It's a survival strategy, the self-obsessive's way of navigating the world, a way to keep the emergency at bay. That's what Morrison seems to be positing throughout Emergency & I, urged along by its crazy rhythms: Retreat is as good as defeat. Bad as it gets, you've gotta keep moving.

I was a teenager when I first heard Emergency & I, still months from college, in a relationship I sensed then was shaky and know now was doomed. Back then, it was a constant. It deepened further for a couple years afterward, after I'd discovered all sorts of instincts I couldn't trust, after I'd found that I too can put myself on pause the way Morrison does in "The Jitters". I set it aside for a while in my mid-twenties, convinced I'd juiced the thing of all its meaning; then I lost a job and a best friend in quick succession, and I buried myself in it again, uncovering untold solace in the same old lines. Talking about these songs with others over the past few weeks, arguing over their slippery meanings, there's precious little in the way of consensus; we've all used it for breakups, for family emergencies, for nights when we're feeling low and can't quite settle on the source. But there's so much in these songs, so many situations to which they seem to hold up a mirror, what we take from them seems forever in flux. Their history, like ours, is constantly changing. One thing keeps coming up, though: Everyone I've talked to mentions that they can't imagine getting through their twenties without it. I certainly couldn't have. Bet those guys who made it feel the same way.