December 9, 1999
Due to endless loving spins at Club Jared, I have seen the future of pop music, and its name is Emergency & I. Rethinking new wave with a serious post-punk slant and awareness of the dense narrative possibilities offered by hip-hop, the Plan skim the 99th percentile of musical innovation into an orgasmic goulash – hearing it is like flashing through your entire record collection in one go, and is the sort of icy blast of fresh air that sends us critics spewing reference points in a futile attempt to prepare you for Something Entirely New. Talking Heads getting sodomized by Gang of Four? XTC bitch-slapping Husker Du? Fishbone arm-wrestling Radiohead? More.
The Dismemberment Plan is to pop music what Being John Malkovich is to current cinema - bizarre, fun, innovative and surprisingly moving. It's also insanely catchy, noisy and geeky-cool, with barnstorming keyboard work (these guys don't approach new wave keyboards in an ironic "ain't-we-retro" sense, more of a "betcha never heard THIS sound before", which believe me, you haven’t), and insistently funky rhythms coupled with ingenious lyricism that keeps your brain as busy as your booty.
Singer Travis Morrison delivers potent metaphors and striking narratives in his plangent, commanding tenor to match the startling arrangements: A sweetly magic invitation that dispels ostracism. A "Memory Machine" which can heal a broken heart that, like a "Gyroscope", might be able to maintain balance if it spins fast enough. The last "8 ½ Minutes" of civilization. A relationship with a magician that leaves you as helpless as a "Spider in The Snow". And if the pulsing keys of "The City" didn’t make you shake your ass so hard, you might just find this breakup tune too overwhelmingly poignant to bear.
On the Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime, D. Boon memorably asked, "Do you want new wave or do you want the truth?" Seventeen years later, The Dismemberment Plan definitively proves you can have both, with beauty and catharsis to match. This is the album I’ll be playing when that big odometer in the sky clicks over and sends the battered corpse of the 20th century into history.
- Jared O'Connor
Welcome to the future