Review Summary: rock music of the future. Seriously.
There is something very important about The Dismemberment Plan's 1999 album
Emergency & I that is often overlooked, and that is that it has a Point A and a Point B (along with other intermediary points throughout the album), and it transports you from that Point A to that Point B smoothly and effortlessly, without any unnecessary stops or detours. The album touches on a lot of musical themes, almost all of them having a unifying subject matter: this is the album that illustrates the downfall of the great minds of America, those who slyly and candidly observe those around them, sitting in their hotel room because they simply haven't anything else to do. There's also something even more important about the album that is almost never forgotten: the music is ***ing
good. The album, ahead of its time to this day, used fairly standard rock instruments (keyboards, guitars, drums, etc.) to make something entirely new. The term has already been applied to the music of bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Sigur Rós, but the album, as a whole, fits the term "post-rock" perfectly: while not
technically doing anything rock hasn't done, the music combines the instruments and song structures given to them by conventional rock music and twists them back around to devise an all-new genre; the rock music of the future.
The album's brilliance, along with its musical innovation, also lies in its lyrical proficiency. Possibly the album's centerpiece, "You Are Invited" is also a brilliantly surreal blah blah ok *** this just get the goddamn album
peace
-djdorama
