FOR THE RECORD: The Dismemberment Plan

“Emergency & I,” the fourth album by Washington, D.C., quartet the Dismemberment Plan, is my favorite high school record. I don’t think it’s really a problem that I had not heard it until the end of my sophomore year of college. Not everyone agrees with me.

My girlfriend grew up in Bethesda, Md. The D-Plan’s lead singer once called her parents to persuade them to let her attend a concert they were playing in a bad part of town. When I told her I was going to write about “Emergency & I,” she was not amused. “You didn’t even know that record existed until I gave it to you!” Another friend took a similar stance via e-mail: “That [album] was high school for me.”

Fine. But maybe I want “Emergency & I” to be high school for me, too! Musically, the group carries off such an extravagant variety of styles—dance, rock, punk—that one wonders if they aren’t a rotating radio dial filtered through a rock group. More importantly, Travis Morrison’s lyrics are smart but not wise. He describes social, romantic, and suburban anxiety with rare precision, but he never knows how to feel better. The band is perfect for kids who know their clothes don’t fit but don’t know where else to shop, kids who have an inkling that “Fight Club” stinks but don’t want to slog through “The Seventh Seal.”

Despite opening shows for Pearl Jam in 2000 and co-headlining a tour with Death Cab For Cutie in 2002, the D-Plan were most at home in the D.C. suburbs. Their musical roots can be found in D.C. as well, particularly in the incredibly rich indie rock scene that flourished there in the early ‘90s. Fugazi, with its playfully militant clatterings, are clearly a big influence.

On “Emergency & I,” the D.C. area’s noisy, slightly self-righteous sound is tempered by relentless, self-deprecating irony and graceful, charismatic sonic power. “Spider in the Snow”—you’re the spider, by the way—best embodies the album’s alienated tone. As the band disinterestedly shifts from lazy funk to Radiohead’s electronic quaver, Morrison’s bored vocals are an emotional dead weight: “How can a body move the speed of light / And still find itself in such a rut?”

On “Gyroscope,” the band jerks along through the first verse, negotiating frequent time changes. Jason Caddell’s guitar and Joe Easley’s drums move quickly but not really forward; they awkwardly try to keep their balance. Morrison sing-speaks quiet, descending lines about a woman’s poorly concealed emotional turmoil upon seeing her ex: “She knows he’s coming, it’s really all right / Nobody here could know how she feels.”

Then the chorus: “If she spins fast enough then maybe the broken pieces of her heart will stay together / But ain’t no gyroscope can spin forever, yeah.” Morrison’s vocal lines are still descending, but they become a melodic yell, and the guitars have abandoned their dissonant stabs and opened up into rich major chords.

It’s a change that’s so unified and so exciting that it doesn’t matter that both of the song’s characters are irreparably damaged. Everyone’s damaged! If you can’t do anything about it—and the D-Plan definitely can’t—why not do something fun within it? Why not play that descending line with major chords? Or, as Morrison puts it, “Happiness...can kill you, but no one wants to be that tacky about it.”

I’m still told that the only way to understand the intimacy of the bond between the D-Plan and their D.C. fans is to have actually been one of those fans. They performed all the time, frequently for free, and when they played “The Ice of Boston” everyone was invited onstage. Didn’t matter how many people or how small a stage. Everyone gets invited.

I find now that I gravitate toward music that can tell me things I don’t already know, but there are still times when I feel a very simple, almost juvenile desire to just be invited. “Emergency & I” is not a healthy way of dealing with late adolescent alienation. It doesn’t transcend the emotions that compel listeners to identify with it in the first place. But sometimes not enough is enough.

—Staff reviewer Richard S. Beck can be reached at rbeck@fas.harvard.edu.