Emergency & I is the third studio album by American indie rock band the Dismemberment Plan, released in 1999 by DeSoto Records. It was produced by J. Robbins and Chad Clark, and primarily recorded at Water Music Studios in 1998, with additional recordings done at Inner Ear Studios. At its release, the album was met with critical acclaim, receiving praise for its instrumental performances and lyrics.
Initially released on CD, Barsuk Records reissued Emergency & I in vinyl format for the first time on January 11, 2011 where it received further praise from critics and listeners, with many calling it a landmark indie rock album and the band's best release.
Background
After a press photoshoot for the band's second album The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, the band decided that they wanted to sound "less wacky" on their third album, feeling like their sound had been gradually settling down. According to bassist Eric Axelson, the album was written across seven different rehearsal spaces, and the band attempted to individually write their parts like it sounded it came from a group. He noted that vocalist and guitarist Travis Morrison "had a knack" of matching his ideas with other ideas the group developed separately. One notable example of this is the chorus to "Back and Forth", which he came up with while going to work one morning not knowing what it would sound like as a song, and then going to rehearsal later that night and finding Axelson and drummer Joe Easley playing what would be the instrumental to the song. Another example, "Spider in the Snow", involved Axelson and Easley performing their final riffs and drum parts for the song "in straight-four, like a Motown thing", until Morrison suggested they "cut a beat off the end of the phrase", resulting in the final song.
Of the other songs worked on in this period, "I Love a Magician" was quickly written in and heavily influenced by the surroundings of one rehearsal space, the basement of an office building in Falls Church, Virginia. According to Morrison: "The ceiling was like five and a half feet off the ground. I'm not sure we were supposed to be there at all. Security guards were staring at us as we wheeled in our amps. I remember Jason [Caddell] howling away with this new distortion pedal. We wrote the song around that sound, pretty much." "Memory Machine" was the first of several songs on the album that made use of an E-mu sampler, specifically making use of an "ambient noise" from an unknown song by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Robbins noted that "The City", influenced by the band Soul Coughing, first started being written roughly two days prior to the sessions, and a portion of an early version was captured on the master tapes to the single. Using the money from Interscope, the album was recorded in three weeks at Water Music Studios in Hoboken, New Jersey.
Unlike Inner Ear Studios, the smaller recording studio in Arlington, Virginia the band used for ! and The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified where they had to rush through albums on a budget, Water Music was a more expansive studio with its own five/six-bedroom apartment above the studio. The band had more money, time, space, and resources to work on the album in the complex, which Morrison likened to a college dormitory. Easley praised the acoustics of the wooden main recording room at Water Music, calling it "the one room I ever got to record in that was awesome for drums." According to Nolan James of Pacific Lutheran University: "It really does sound more like the rock music that would be released throughout the next decade, with its soft male-lead vocals and noisy, basic guitar. It is pretty forward-thinking in that way. meandering verses suddenly transition into great, climactic choruses, and likewise subdued and unexciting choruses follow intricate, well-built verses." Clark felt the death of Morrison's father loomed over the album "in a way that I think gave it a gravity." Zachary Houle argued that songs such as "Memory Machine" and "What Do You Want Me to Say?" deal with themes of disconnectedness in the Information Age, including predicting the social media phenomenon that would be prominent in the following decade.
Morrison claimed to have first thought of the album's title after returning to Washington, D.C. from the recording sessions on July 16, 1998, during a Shudder to Think concert at the Black Cat nightclub, but he did not know what the title meant. Paul Thompson of Pitchfork related the album title to the encroaching chaos of modern life with the self. Morrison could not recall the logic behind why Interscope released the EP in the first place, but in retrospect described it as "not an earth-shaking release." One week before the release of The Ice of Boston EP in October 1998, Seagram announced that they would be divesting the rest of PolyGram's entertainment assets and folding their music division into Universal, leading to several rounds of label restructuring. In early 1999, they decided to merge Geffen Records and the recently acquired A&M Records into Interscope, leading Universal to announce that they would cut numerous artists from Interscope.
In April 1999, while on tour with Robbins' band Burning Airlines, The Dismemberment Plan were informed they were one of the artists affected by the cut. As part of their departure from Interscope, the band was awarded $50,000, which they had been owed as part of their contract to record a second album.
Morrison recalled not feeling proud of the album until he heard two songs from it played on college radio stations while the band was on tour, and when fans started telling him they downloaded the album off of Napster.
On January 11, 2011, Barsuk Records issued the vinyl edition of Emergency & I, which includes an oral history of the band conducted by The A.V. Clubs Josh Modell. The vinyl reissue came with 4 bonus tracks. "Since You Died" was the B-side to the vinyl 7-inch release of "What Do You Want Me to Say?", an earlier recording of the song released in November 1997, before Emergency & I was recorded.
| rev2 = Alternative Press
| rev2score = 4/5
| rev3 = Beats Per Minute
| rev3score = 95%
| rev4 = Consequence of Sound
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| rev5 = Kerrang!
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| rev6 = Pitchfork
| rev6score = 9.6/10 (1999)<br />10/10 (2011)
| rev7 = PopMatters
| rev7score = 10/10
| rev8 = Rolling Stone
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| rev9 = The Rolling Stone Album Guide
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| rev10 = Tiny Mix Tapes
| rev10score = 5/5
| rev11 = The Village Voice
| rev11score = A−
Critical response
Emergency & I received overwhelming critical acclaim. The album has been described by Rolling Stone as "a game-changer for indie rock fans",
Brent DiCrescenzo of Pitchfork originally gave the album a 9.6 out of 10, with a short review that read simply, "If you consider yourself a fan of groundbreaking pop, go out and buy this album right now. Now. Get up. Go." Despite this, a later review of the album by Amy Adoyzie in a 2005 issue of the zine was noticeably more positive, saying "The combination of the spastic guitars, loopy keyboards and throbbing drumbeats draws you in and makes you listen. The Plan has a rhythm that’s off somehow, but it doesn’t matter, because we’re all a bit off rhythm ourselves."
Accolades and retrospective reviews
Emergency & I was ranked the best album of 1999 by Pitchfork. Staff writer Steven Edelstone called the album "a stone-cold classic, a record that sounds just as fresh today as it did 20 years ago." On the same website, the album was ranked No. 16 on their "redux" version of the Top 100 Albums of the 1990s list, with William Morris writing "The album's lyric book reads better than half the modern volumes on my bookshelf. Modern R&B should have as much rhythm. Modern rock should have as much balls." In addition, the website ranked the track "The City" No. 64 on their list of the Top 200 Tracks of the 1990s. In December 2007 the album was ranked number 95 on Blenders 100 Greatest Indie-Rock Albums Ever list.
The album's 2011 vinyl reissue brought about numerous positive reviews as well. Zachary Houle of PopMatters wrote that "Just in terms of a sheer personal enjoyment factor, I would almost argue the case for a new rating: the Spinal Tap-esque 11. Emergency & I is just a relentless record, full of youthful abandon and insightful penetrations into the technology-addled brain. I just can't get enough of it." The album was ranked at number 26 on Spins "The 300 Best Albums of the Past 30 Years (1985–2014)" list.
In the reissue's liner notes, Ben Gibbard, the frontman of Death Cab for Cutie who toured with The Dismemberment Plan following the release of their fourth studio album Change, praised Emergency & I and called it one of the albums that "helps make the yearbook of my band. And even though the record has this scholarly element, the songs still translate with very base human emotions, like love and loss and finding one's place in the world." Robbins called it one of the best albums he ever worked on.
Track listing
"A Life of Possibilities", "What Do You Want Me to Say?", "The Jitters" and "The City" are all also featured in remixed form on A People's History of The Dismemberment Plan.
Personnel
Personnel adapted from the liner notes to the original 1999 CD release and 2011 vinyl reissue