Biography
Although they're not
strictly "progressive rock" by most definitions, the Dismemberment
Plan are probably second only to the post-rock scene in the
category of "recent non-prog bands that prog fans are talking
about these days." And not without good reason -- the
Plan are an adventurous bunch, taking the penchant for unusual
time signatures and guitar noise from their post-hardcore roots
(Shudder to Think, anyone?) and combining it with their own
love of squiggly keyboard synths, unusual textures and structures,
and genres ranging from funk to punk to emo to hip-hop.
They didn't start
out there, though. Their debut, "!", was a truly
obnoxious affair, full of screamy vocals. By The Dismemberment
Plan is Terrified, though, they'd blossomed into an excellent
hyperactive indie-punk outfit with a taste for weirdness and
experimentation. Emergency & I finds them refining
their spazzy rock into a tuneful, quirky and complex indie-rock
eclecticism. The new album, Change, was released
last month, and its higher production and more thoughtful
affect suggest that the Plan has calmed down without sacrificing
their creativity. -
Alex Temple [November 2001]
The
Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified (1997)
The sophomore
release from the "prog fan's indie rock band" often goes overlooked
in the shadow of its more critically successful successors,
1999's Emergency & I and the recently released Change.
In some ways it's not hard to tell why -- the later albums are
clearly more polished and "mature" (whatever that means) musical
statements than this one. But while Change and
Emergency & I have plenty to recommend them, there's
one element that's all over The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified
that I miss in the band's later work: unpredictable, spazzy,
chaotic noise.
It's true, Emergency
& I does have its crazier moments. "Memory Machine,"
"Girl O'Clock" and "I Love a Magician" all have an element of
chaos to them. But even there, you won't find the jagged,
angular riff that opens "Academy Award," the dissonant keyboard
clusters and distorted guitar noise of "Manipulate Me," or the
exaggerated, multi-tracked falsetto of "That's When the Party
Started." There, there were moments of cheerful pop; here,
the more consonant moments are undermined by chromatic out-notes.
But at the same time, the brilliant, infectious tunes on Is
Terrified are miles beyond anything on their thoroughly
irritating debut, "!", on which vocals were consistently
screamed instead of sung, and noise was more a default than
a structural element.
In a sense, Is
Terrified could be considered the first "real" Dismemberment
Plan album. The elements that define the band's current sound
were largely absent from "!", and many of them show up
here for the first time: the use of keyboards as bass instruments,
the characteristic off-kilter chord progressions, the
"bleeping" guitar sound, the abrupt jump out of a falsetto.
The Plan's wonderful sense of texture also starts to become
apparent here; While that element of the music is more noticeable
on Emergency & I, Is Terrified offers some
serious competition, from gritty synths on "That's When the
Party Started" to the crunchy groove of "Bra," from the 4/4
hi-hats accompanying the 5/8+3/4 opening of "Academy Award"
to the stereo-shifting bassline of "It's So You." The
lyrics, too, have taken a major step up, and although they haven't
yet reached the pensiveness of the Plan's later work, there's
an endearingly smart-ass, sardonically intellectual humor that
pervades the album. "Do the Standing Still," for example,
is an ode to "the brand new step that everybody ISN'T moving
to," and on "Tonight We Mean It," Travis Morrison's Micro-Machines
sputter gives us lines like "Leave your context at home and
check your irony at the door" and "We're going to a place that
never existed, and probably never will, yeah."
I can see why
some people might not like this album as much as I do.
Many of the vocals are spoken, chanted or occasionally screamed,
and the obnoxiousness of "!" does come through in a few
places, notably on the "The Ice of Boston," which is (to be
anachronistic) sort of a shorter, more cynical and more annoying
version of Weird Al Yankovic's "Albuquerque." The belligerent
affect of "One Too Many Blows to the Head" threatens to get
on my nerves as well, although for me the video game sound effects
and an atonal horn section in the middle of the song make up
for it. Some people might also be put off by the uniformity
of mood. True, the first ten songs are all more
or less upbeat, but for me that just increases the power of
ending the album with twelve and a half minutes of slow, quiet,
pensive music -- quiet and pensive, that is, until the powerful
(and non-melodramatic) crescendo of the last four minutes.
All in all, the minor shortcomings of Is Terrified are
more than compensated for by the inventiveness, creativity and
downright addictiveness of the album, and while I may have more
respect for the Dismemberment Plan's later albums, I'd have
to say that this one is my personal favorite.
- Alex Temple [November 2001]
Click
Here for Tracklist and Lineup Info
Emergency
& I (1999)
Ask a Univers
Zero fan where to start in their discography, and they'll most
likely tell you to get Ceux du Dehors, and then go backwards
if you like the acoustic aspects and forwards if you like the
electric aspects. Emergency & I plays a similar role
in the Dismemberment Plan's work, fusing the jerky, spasmodic
post-hardcore influences of their earlier albums with the calmer,
more pensive aspects of their recent work. Plus, it's
got the added bonus for the prog fan of being absolutely saturated
with analog synths. At the same time, though, the album
isn't just an arithmetic mean of 1997's The Dismemberment
Plan Is Terrified and 2001's Change. For one
thing, it's a lot more openly eclectic than any of the Plan's
other albums.
Take "Back and
Forth," for example, whose verses sound like Bob Dylan backed
by the Talking Heads, with choruses so archetypically indie-rock
it's hard to believe they're real. "Girl O'Clock" is a
hyperactive stuttering no-wave piece, except for the falsetto-filled
Elephant-6-on-crack interruptions that keep popping up, and
the dissolution around the two minute mark from a vaguely alt-rock
section into a very brief quote of the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's
Delight." "The Jitters" brings to mind a jazzy, stripped-down
Radiohead, and "I Love a Musician" has something to do with
hip-hop and noise, but doesn't sound much like either.
Despite all this, the Plan don't sound derivative; instead,
they fuse all of these influences into something completely
unique.
The other thing
that distinguishes Emergency & I from the band's
other albums is the use of texture. While all of
their albums have some interesting textures, here they are nothing
less than a major structural element. "A Life of Possibilities,"
for example, opens with lead singer Travis Morrison's voice
singing a figure based on two notes, one of which is sung falsetto
and the other of which isn't. This is layered over a prickly
keyboard bassline and barely audible, cymbal-heavy drumming
to create a fascinating, very open texture, which is soon filled
out by the entrance of jangly indie guitars. It's only
at the end of the song that we get the expected chorus, at which
point the drumming becomes much more aggressive and the guitars
take on a thick alternative rock sound.
The ending of
"Back and Forth" is another example of truly brilliant instrumentation:
deliciously whiny analog synths layer on top of complex drum
patterns and polyrhythmic guitar grooves that rebound off of
each other in both speakers. It's a truly perfect minute,
combining everything that the mid-period Talking Heads tried
to do with everything Steve Reich tried to do, and somehow working
much more effectively than either. And although not all
of the songs have such unusual structures, even the verse-chorus-verse
tracks are accentuated by an incredible attention to the actual
sounds being played at any given moment. For instance,
each occurrence of the chorus in "You Are Invited" has a different
accompaniment, ranging from 70s-sounding drum machines to full-blast
alt-rock guitars.
And then there's the lyrics. Travis Morrison is an incredibly
astute man, with a wonderful sense of the unexpected but unpretentious
turn of phrase. As the title of the album suggests, most
of the songs here deal with his interactions with various crises,
from horniness ("Girl O'Clock") to the end of the world ("8
1/2 Minutes"). Stereotypical rock-isms like "yeah" or
"c'mon baby" or "put your hands in the air" fit comfortably
alongside philosophical musings like "we're moving through
a phosophorescent gel, a semi-solid self-lit ocean." Even
the more subtle lines tend to avoid the obvious, setting up
and breaking parallelisms: In "The City," one of the album's
most powerful tracks, he sings: "I'm not unsympathetic / I see
why you left / There's no one to know / There's nothing to do
/ The city's been dead / Since you've been gone." Of course,
the lyrics and the texture are intimately related: on the word
"gone," half the instruments suddenly drop out.
So, any caveats?
Well, irregular meters and analog synths do not a prog album
make, and some prog fans might be annoyed by the fact that,
well, this is basically an indie rock album. Morrison's
voice, in particular, has some of that indie flatness inherited
from Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, which might irritate some
people. (Ironically, the one part of the album that annoys
me is in "What Do You Want Me To Say?", where Morrison sounds
more grunge than indie.) Narrow definitions aside,
though, this is a truly fantastic album, and I recommend it
unreservedly to anyone who thinks that only bands listed in
the GEPR can be "progressive."
- Alex Temple [November 2001]
