I’ve mostly been listening to my vinyl records at night, lately, and the reason has to do with them being generally placid, mostly encompassing music recorded before 1980. Punk rock came along, of course, in the 1970s, and is surely enjoying a resurgence, at least around where I live, among girls in their 20s, in the form of the post-millennial stuff like Fall out Boy and God knows who else.
Well, The Dismemberment Plan is a harder band to copy than Green Day (nothing against the perennially rocking slackers from the Bay Area, mind you), and this is to their infinite credit. I remember some post of Travis Morrison listing his top 100 albums of all time and the genre dynamic was completely ridiculous, spanning funk, soul, punk, ska (Fishbone’s Truth and Soul, I believe [1]), hip-hop, and probably more that I’m blanking on right now.
Now, why do The Plan need to come back to revive vinyl rock [2]? I mean, Emergency & I (1999) is a stellar, indefatigable beast, toting a dizzying array of influences [3] and laying down some of the tightest, most exciting rock grooves in the history of indie rock (“I Love a Magician”; “Girl O’ Clock”). I’ve never heard it on vinyl, to be honest.
To take one listen to a snippet of “What Do You Want Me to Say?”, anyway, as it were, was to immediately develop a new musical love, largely for that funky beat that they, again, juxtaposed ironically with a crunchy, grunge guitar sound and laid-back, laconic white-boy vocals.
What I’m getting at in terms of “reviving vinyl rock” involves a phenomenon approximating exact definition of sound. The work The Dismemberment Plan did on Emergency & I, that is, amounts to a great pastiche — you take the shrill guitar tones of Pavement, essentially, and flank them with a Kool & the Gang groove [4]. On later albums like Change and Uncanney Valley, we get a little more of a blended sound, like one unified, opaque Dismemberment Plan FABRIC, to define them on beautiful listens like “Go and Get it” and “Daddy Was a Real Good Dancer”; etc., along with “Face of the Earth”; “Ellen and Ben”; et. al.
So we have Emergency & I, a decidedly “rock” album, and we have Change and Uncanney Valley [5], two better-developed LP’s in the realm of defining the band’s sound, but steps backward in the efforts of defining what makes “rock” music. They’d both be evening albums for me, in other words, like most of my hippy-dippy Neil Young, Jethro Tull, Cat Stevens [6] and all the other records I currently own. What I’m looking for is something more visceral, basically, but with a more unified sound than is offered on the pastiche, semi-retro Emergency & I, which, at the end of the day, plays as a great covers album.
Jamming, undoubtedly, would be an essential component to achieving this phenomenon, which I envision as approximating the last albums by Hum and TOOL, if only for the fact that each of these LP’s saw the respective bands unleashing songs that were markedly longer than their previous default. Some new equipment for Jason Caddell would seem to be in order, like a gear arsenal that could tweak sound in a different way, while also catering to a mix that’s solid, physical and unique. Obviously, this sh** takes a lot of work. That’s why I’m buying their burgers.
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[1] This wouldn’t necessarily be my go-to Fishbone LP — The Essential Fishbone, despite compilation format, is a bulbously gratifying listen, and The Reality of My Surroundings, a stylistic departure for its pointedly “grunge” bent, makes a case as well, not in the least part for its inclusion of the time-stopping “Sunless Saturday.”
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[2] And by “rock,” here, I mean it in the ’90s sense of the requisite loud, distorted or returned guitar sound (so Fleetwood Mac and Counting Crows wouldn’t qualify, in other words).
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[3] The incredible plurality of influences working on The Plan’s music is the reason I choose them for this poignant mission over worthy competitors like The Ar-Kaics, WITCH, The Black Angels, Liars and Black Mountain.
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[4] Along these lines, many props for this incredible achievement should go to Dismemberment Plan bassist Eric Axelrod, probably my third favorite all-time bassist behind Les Claypool and Ben Shepherd.
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[5] For what it’s worth, I’ve never met another person who liked Uncanney Valley (2013), but it’s completely excellent, a light-as-a-feather journey through labyrinthine melodies and lyrical portraits to the tune of “Invisible”; “White Collar White Trash”; “Lookin’”; “Mexico City Christmas”; etc.
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[6] And no help from The Strokes for their Is This it shennanigans, mind you, which was recorded on Pro Tools and no offers no analogue potential (that would have been nice to know when I spotted the album listed as “Essential” on Rough Trade).
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