The members of Washington, D.C.'s the Dismemberment Plan just might be the happiest victims of corporate downsizing you will ever meet. "This is the best thing that ever happened to us," exclaims singer/guitarist Travis Morrison, discussing his band's rocky relationship and narrow escape from the corporate behemoth Universal Music Group and subsequent new home on DeSoto Records, a small indie run by former Jawbox members Kim Coletta and Bill Barbot. "I mean come on, it's wonderful! We get a record paid for, [and now], we're in a situation with a label with two people who completely love us. We were so unbelievably lucky. We basically walked away from a plane crash. Some people died on that plane crash."

Morrison recounts a little of the band's history and the corporate part of their downsizing tale via phone from his temp job as a server programmer in D.C. (drummer Joe Easley moonlights as a server programmer, too.) In their seven-year lifespan, Morrison, Easley, bassist Eric Axelson and guitarist Jason Caddell recorded ! and The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified on DeSoto. Signed to Interscope in 1998, the band released the EP The Ice of Boston as a precursor for their major-label debut. But by the time the album was recorded, Interscope had fallen under the umbrella of the newly formed Universal Music Group. Nine months after finding out they no longer fit into the company's game plan, their third full-length release, Emergency & I was released on DeSoto.

It's an album full of nails-against-blackboards guitars, sing-along choruses and pulsating drum-and-bass beats -- usually all in one song. Highlights include "The Jitters," which sounds like one feels on too much caffeine, too little sleep, and not enough good luck, and the metaphorical gem "You Are Invited," which hits like indie-rock chicken soup for the soul. The most accessible, radio-friendly song on the album, "What Do You Want Me to Say?", contains angular guitars and spoken vocals during its verses, but the chorus explodes into a catchy break-up anthem sing-along. From beginning to end, Emergency shows off an eclectic range of influences. Morrison is like the guy on the corner who wants to sell you batteries, gold watches and everything in-between. He's got your rock, your pop, your hip-hop and your punk. As for the band's influences, he lists everything from the Talking Heads to Public Enemy to the Smiths to the Beatles, and "You know, Fugazi, obviously."

So what do you call a band whose influences range from the Smiths to Public Enemy? Critics have tried avant garde, art rock, punk, post-punk and, most recently, emo. But labels, for the most part, don't seem to interest Morrison. "Terms like avant garde rock, emo, post-punk, they're not inaccurate," he says. "Polka is inaccurate, but nobody's called us polka . . . yet. Let's be honest -- people in the punk world may think we're poppy and catchy and accessible, but normal people think we're really weird. And we are an eccentric band; there's no two ways about it. There's always something really screwed up about our music."

Nonetheless, the band has carved out its own niche. Incessant touring has brought "The Plan," as their devotees call them, to the masses, and it's the strength of the live shows that has won the often not-so-amenable crowds over. Oddly, some hometown fans have taken to showing up at performances dressed in Hamburglar outfits or as Pokemon characters. "It was so weird," he says of the Pokemon incident. "I just stopped singing." Ultimately though, he is appreciative. "It's kind of cool. [The fans are] a force to be reckoned with and may be more creatively minded than we are, so we have to step up. And so I think they're challenging in a great way."

And now, having been picked to open for Pearl Jam on their European tour, the band will be taking that challenge to larger audiences. Still, to hear Morrison tell it, winning over fans and converting the masses was never a big part of Dismemberment Plan's plan. "Interscope aside," Morrison says, "I'm not really concerned with making videos to convince people I don't know to like [us]."

Asked whether that attitude makes the band a punk band, Morrison calls the question "dangerous." "If someone who listens to a lot of Ramones and Iggy reads us describing ourselves as punk, they're gonna be like, 'Wrong, have you heard their music?'" he says. But going on to describe what punk sensibilities the band might share, Morrison inadvertently answers the question. "In my mind, the punk tradition, at least here in Washington, is based in things like a 'think globally, act locally' mentality, that when it comes down to it your number one priority is rocking your friends at a church show. That's punk to me. Do it yourself -- that's punk. Not because of some kind of tilt against the machine or the man, but simply because it never occurred to you to do it any other way."

CHRISTINA SARACENO
(April 26, 2000)