The Dismemberment Plan Band • Page 8

The city / back and forth

 

8 1/2 Minutes

 

back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and baaaack

 

The lyrics on E&I are wonderful. The fact that he somehow wrote even better ones for Change blows my mind.

 

..and I wonder how ya been, and how you'll always be my hero even if I'll never see you again.


That lyric in particular when I was just getting into this band circa 2009 was very personal to me.

 

Can we appreciate The Jitters and Automatic for being two of the best songs about dread I've ever heard?

 

"Stolen cars in a heap / a naked body on the neighbors yard"

"I could feel my toes curl through the yellow sand as I watched you slip away"


Fuck Travis Morrison for writing lines like this haha

 

The line about a face going beneath the white caps or waves is great in Automatic too.

 

I always loved this write-up on Change from Coke Machine Glow (RIP):

"

17 :: Dismemberment Plan
Change
(DeSoto; 2001)

How to write about this, my pick for album of the decade and probably favorite album? Does it suffice to say that I once proposed an article to CMG wherein I simply quoted the lyrics to “The Face of the Earth” in their entirety and then pointed to them, eyebrows raised, their quality self-evident? Though a combination of editorial chutzpah and good taste put an end to the idea, I still stand by the homerism, informed as it is by the Plan’s transcendent sublimation of creativity and accessibility, so difficult to balance, let alone distill. Change is an album with which I still check in weekly, like an old friend who lives in another city and for whom alone one subscribes to a long distance plan. It would also turn out to be the band’s last album unless you count Travis Morrison’s two solo efforts, or Maritime, or Statehood, which no one does. Even their follow-up acts sound like meek impersonations of a one-of-a kind juggernaut—and this, their Remain in Light (1980).

Take that same spark in the chest that the Plan set off when you first heard “You Are Invited” or “The City” or “Ice of Boston”—that indication that Travis Morrison might be Stephen Malkmus with an inclusive rather than ironic sense of snottiness—and mature it in the frighteningly short period after Emergency & I. Consider a long thread on the CMG boards on which various staff talked about “Ellen & Ben” and found everything in it from the difficulty in locating empathy as one grows older to a very adolescent sense of universal heartbreak to discreet boning. Broadly speaking, Change is a masterfully vulnerable metaphor about the endemic shittiness and beauty of being a human being and having to live with other human beings.

And if you don’t care about all this rooted philosophical crap, then there’s still some of the most melodic, breakneck, and inventive indie rock of all time. There’s still Joe Easley’s uniquely acrobatic drumming, Eric Axelson’s morphing bass, and Morrison’s apparent ability to sing in an everyman voice even when singing about having superpowers that allow you to inhabit another person millions of miles away as metaphor for the strange isolation and neutrality that would constitute true empathy. Which, together on something like “The Other Side” culminate into such textured and brilliantly arranged music that it just isn’t even fucking fair to other bands. How can an lineup like this be so criminally under-referenced? How do you break up this band? I still want to shake them, demand why. The thought of what could have followed Change haunts me.

Their chemistry was just undeniable, their musicianship staggering. A band I once played in had the privilege of opening for the Plan in Ottawa back in 2000, just before Change would be released, and I count hearing some of those unreleased songs performed during their soundcheck among the coolest twenty minutes of my life. I count the Plan’s set in Toronto during the “Death and Dismemberment” tour with Death Cab for Cutie among the best shows I’ve ever seen, up there with live show titans like Spiritualized and Mogwai and Sweep the Leg Johnny and Radiohead. It’s hard to describe in words just how seamless their rhythms were, how unpretentious their crescendos, just how fucking classic this band should, by all rights, be.

It’s cruel irony that a band so accessible should never attain the appreciation they were due.They once opened for Pearl Jam, and I think that might represent the apex of their exposure, just as opening for them was the apex of mine. (I think there were about fifteen people there.) But the Plan’s ability to make so effortlessly universal such intimate dilemmas, and to soundtrack that unease with all of the stubborn enthusiasm accorded each our own personal dramas, make them—at least during the forty-odd minutes you spend with their album—unstoppable. Perhaps I should simply quote “Secret Curse,” whose initial “anonymous hex on flavorless food and terrible sex / a day of no rhythm a night of no rest / and I do not know what sin I have not confessed” is cerebral emo to its more aching “I don’t know who you are…please, I’m sorry”; or something as simple as “there are days when a warm look from a strange face will make me forget my name.” To explain how these lines come off as inspiring really is in the listening; Morrison treated his audience as an equal in a conversation, and I simply can’t articulate the rarity of that."

 

that was a cool website - good write up on the best DP album

 

Damn that write up is really really good.

Fuck Change is great. Now I really want to jam The Other Side or Come Home. or the whole album.

 

Seriously though I always thought the Death and Dismemberment was a fantastic name for a tour. Shame I've never really given Death Cab a fair shake besides their singles.

Also the Plan opening for Pearl Jam is so weird haha.

 

Old Death Cab is like Change-era D Plan on qualuudes. I really love some of that music. I don't really care for anything post Transatlanticism except for once in a blue moon. Agreed though, perfect name for a tour.

 

Just wanted to jump in to say this is one of the best ending lines in a song ever. Just one of the best lines rly

 

Actually Audrey might be right Spider In The Snow is the best

 

I'm going to listen to Changes now and possibly post about it so fucking brace yourself

 

Pay For The Piano is so good

 

hit us when you finally realize it's the better DP album o_o

 

;)

 

Nah my friend, I'll always be team E&I, but God damn they're both magical albums.

I need to check the others out as well, except the 2013 abomination

 

the kind-of-dissonant synth in the background is what makes the song immense

such a unique band - I don't think there's another band out there with their sound... it's weird because no one even tries to rip them off...

 

keep your heart open for CHANGE

see what I did there...

 

Well done haha

yeah they're certainly very unique and not easily imitated. Cymbals Eat Guitars kind of give me D-Plan vibes

 

I would agree, but more in feel/approach than in sound

 

a lot of bands have that subtle influence (hotelier, emperor X, cymbals) usually combined with stronger portions of other bands (weakerthans, mountain goats, etc)