Secret History: Emergency & I
Our new occasional series, "Secret History", features DCist contributor Brandon Gentry profiling classic D.C. albums as a way of looking back at the District's contributions to music over time. To start the series, he takes a look at the Dismemberment Plan's Emergency & I (DeSoto, 1999).
"We're the Dismemberment Plan, and we're from Washington, D.C."
With these words, Travis Morrison, the Dismemberment Plan's singer, guitarist, and perennial D.C. cheerleader, introduced kids in clubs all over the country (and the world — they toured Japan and Europe, too) to his band's frenetic brand of sharp-edged, beat-heavy indie rock. Winning the hearts of thousands while at the same time serving as global ambassadors for the D.C. scene, the D-Plan spread the District's sound and rep far and wide, promoting their hometown with an enthusiasm born of genuine affection.
Over the better part of a decade, beginning with 1994's Can We Be Mature? and ending with 2001's Change, Morrison and company (Jason Caddell on guitar, Eric Axelson on bass, and Joe Easley on drums) produced album after album of top-drawer noise, combining a rhythmic sensibility informed by reggae, R&B, hip-hop, synthpop, techno, and D.C.'s native Go-Go with aggressive melodicism, prickly punk-funk, emo introspection, art-damaged paranoia, and, critically, a sly sense of humor.
And of all the Plan's albums, 1999's Emergency & I is the pinnacle: 45 near-perfect minutes of catchy, dancey, endlessly engaging tunes that sound as fresh and exciting today as they did a decade ago. It gained the band a relatively colossal profile, landing them supporting slots with the likes of Pearl Jam (it's true) and ensuring that a Dismemberment Plan/Death Cab for Cutie (before their days as stadium fillers) tour sold out dates across the country. Emergency & I is an album to be enjoyed and admired in equal measure, chock full of inventive melodies and razor-honed hooks, packing a powerful rhythmic punch (Axelson, who also contributes to DCist, and Easley, one of the best rhythm sections in the business, most recently held down the beats in Statehood), and marked by a sweaty, hyper-verbal intelligence.
The key lyrical themes — the urban malaise of "The City," the emotional alienation of "The Jitters," "8 1/2 Minutes"'s apocalyptic musings, memory and reminiscence in "Memory Machine" — create a unique, and absorbing listening experience, uncannily capturing the feel of post-college, pre-30s urban life. "As I would walk down K Street to some temping job/ As winter froze the life out of fall/ Yeah, I must've been having a ball," opines Morrison in a drained murmur on "Spider In The Snow," painting the good old days in a decidedly somber light.
The album's use of club-ready beats under thorny guitars makes Emergency & I a progenitor of the dancepunk sound of the early 2000s, anticipating the rise of bands like the Liars, LCD Soundsystem, the Rapture, and !!!. Today, we can hear traces of the Plan's attack in guitar 'n' beats electropop outfits like Hot Chip, and in disco-ready rockers like Bloc Party and Franz Ferdinand. The aggressively chiming "Back And Forth" and "Girl O'Clock," with its thrashing, twisted lead lines and beyond-complex drum and bass patterns, pack enough heat and energy to keep pulses quickened for days. The Krautrock-cum-Clash of the angrily anthemic "What Do You Want Me to Say?" is expertly bracing, moving from sinister mechanical bleepscape to jagged six-string attack with head-snapping suddenness, while the off-kilter stomp and trebly stabs of "Gyroscope" create a wildly oscillating carol punctuated by Morrison' weary battle cry: "Happiness is such hard work/ It gets harder everyday/ And it can kill you/ But no one wants to be that tacky about it."
Beyond being the Plan's highest light and the album that finally garnered them significant national attention, Emergency & I is one of the best albums of the '90s and a stellar example of why the decade was such a rich period for D.C. indie rock. In Emergency & I we hear the inventiveness and daring of the period on an LP that combines hardcore's intensity and mathrock's braininess, R&B's pulse and postpunk's nerviness, into an artifact of inspired sonic alchemy. It's a record unembarrassed to flaunt its influences, conceived and played by guys who grew up on rock and punk and hardcore but embraced musical styles far beyond their scene.