A Reflection on The Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I
by Jack Griffis
Like a ghost, a creaking and subtle feeling of melancholy and aimlessness, a sort of spiritual vagrancy settles over the end of the 20th century and the entrance into a new millennium. Emo (short for Emotional Hardcore and generally recognized as a Post-Hardcore genre), once known for its fast and aggressive cries of social dissonance, influenced by the political intensity of the hardcore scene that birthed it and characterized by bands such as Rites of Spring, transforms into the (relatively) quiet and socially-agonized Midwest and Second Wave Emo of the 90s, producing bands such as American Football and Jimmy Eat World. And then, the unnameable arose: The Internet. Suddenly social connection is available across the globe, international trade is now possible on a level of organization previously unthinkable, and cultural exchange can thrive. And yet, more than anything, the world’s musicians, students, and youth who are the first generation to be molded by the internet have never felt more alone. This is 1999. If Y2K was going to end the world, it seemed no one was bothered too much. But at the end of this tunnel of gloom and fear in the face of a changing, yet all too static world, stands Dismemberment Plan’s Emergency & I, a mosaic of early adulthood fears, recollections of lost loves and friendships, and the feeling of utter alienation in a world of rapidly changing social standards and fads. Emergency & I is an album that seems to look at the year 2000 with a depressive indifference begetting someone who feels that no matter how much things change, for the unnamed subjects of each of its eight songs, it’ll all be the same, miserable life.
Released after two mildly well-reviewed albums with unremarkable sales (those being 1995’s ! and 1997’s The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified, both landing solidly in the ⅗ range of most reviewers) in 1999, Emergency & I would ultimately put The Dismemberment Plan on the map of the indie scene, escaping their relatively small roots of DC Post-Hardcore and propelling them into the tours of bands such as Pearl Jam and Death Cab For Cutie throughout the early 2000s, only furthering their influence, particularly among the audiences for the early emo inspired Death Cab For Cutie. However, beneath the art-punk and strange new techniques afforded by their new studio (with The Dismemberment Plan being acquired by Interscope Records before the production of Emergency & I), the frantic guitars and the vast influences (ranging from Bob Dylan to Motown) ran a hidden stream of tragedy and change that producer Chad Clark described as providing the album “gravity.” This gravity is a result of the album living in the shadow of guitarist and vocalist Travis Morrison’s triple-hitter of vast life changes–those being the death of his father, the birth of his younger sister’s child, and his girlfriend breaking up with him (the latter quite literally taking place during a recording session for the album). The specters of death, heartbreak, and birth within a relatively short period for Morrison all provide a background of vast and meaningful interpersonal change– changes that within Morrison caused a seismic shift in his view of his former influences. In the wake of these occurrences, his perspective shifted, forming a belief that the melancholy of Emo and Punk music was self-absorbed and melodramatic, with Morrison describing such music as “deep within one’s own butt” in terms of its perspective. The vast changes within his life and the strange new conditions of the lingering final years of the first millennia were the pressure and heat that created Emergency & I ’s figurative diamond. Morrison’s sorrow and his gradual broadening of perspective were a key influence on the lyricism and sound of Emergency & I, and it is this gradual transition from youthful melancholy to the maturing sorrows of a young man that allowed him to escape “within his own butt” as he might put it. The adolescent-political (what one might refer to as immaturely anarchistic) woes of late Cold War hardcore have transfigured themselves into the crooning digital-toned and endearingly odd cries of a 27-year-old Morrison, reckoning with change and stagnation, the loss of flighty youth and the end of his own self-pity in the face of greater anguish.
Ironically, Emergency & I falls into my life at what I consider the apex of my own self-pity and adolescent woes: 15 years old. I was an unreasonably downcast teenager, and the onslaught of a lockdown didn’t help. One of the few benefits of being stuck inside was the free time it afforded me to explore music, and it just so happened that Emergency & I popped up on my recommended page (or was it autoplay? So many years and so many concussions have passed I forget how) and brought me the odd stylings of The Dismemberment Plan. I would listen to it, and enjoy the tunes, but frankly, at the time the outwardly energetic stylings turned me off. It would be another few months before I traversed into the hardcore and crust punk genres, as gradually their abrasive stylings brought me up to a higher RPM. But for the moment, I was hopelessly in love with the twinkly slow-jams of American Football’s American Football, an album that has consistently landed in my Spotify top 100 for five years running, go figure. Emergency & I remained extant in the back of my mind, popping up on shuffle, maybe prompting me to give it a relisten and find it was still a pleasant album. Oddly enough, it was a song from the earlier The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified, “The Ice of Boston,” a track about an unfortunate New Year’s Eve party drenched with the wide-shot melancholia that would be further developed in Emergency & I, that would provide me the impetus to go back and give the album a serious listen, a jaunt I’m glad I undertook.
Rather than provide a brief snapshot of my feelings on each song, I’d like to dive into two of my favorite songs, their production and general sound, a potential interpretation (alongside a comparison with the “official” interpretation of both the band and lyric collecting sites), and what each song means to me personally. Imagine it as a kind of lyrical tarot card reading– the surface, the meaning of the symbols, and a look inward related to each song. For those of you who might be keeping track at home in the future(and a retroactive thank you to those who are!)– if I stick to this format of writing on music, this’ll be where it starts. Without further ado, I’d like to discuss “Spider in the Snow” and “The City,” my favorite tracks off Emergency & I.
Same VCR, The Same Cats: The Desolation of “Spider in the Snow”
Opening with a right-ear leaning high-pitched synth, “Spider in the Snow” is a song that from its beginning seems to resound with restraint and compactness– a short loop of catchy drum grooves, subtle bass work, and the high-pitched yet immediately dejected sounding guitar define the song, overlaid over that same two-note droning synth. Then, suddenly it descends into only the riffs of a bass and the grooving of a drum, and there from a dark corner in a small room seems to arise Travis Morrison’s youthful and subtle voice. Not possessing the screaming, dial tone electronics of “Memory Machine” or the breakneck speed of “Gyroscope”, instead the defining trait of “Spider in the Snow” is its studio apartment-sized ennui.
The first verse of the song is fittingly composed of brief, almost spoken prose, restrained similarly to the rest of the song’s form. Morrison describes a social amnesiac of sorts– “The only thing worse than bad memories/Is no memories at all/From the age of 20 to 22 I had five friends/None of whose names I can recall.” It’s a powerful quintet of lines that establishes the lonely themes in “Spider in The Snow” almost immediately. We are presented with a picture of a man completely disconnected from his own life, left with very few memories of anything he can call his own.
Following another stanza regarding the life changes that the narrator has experienced, which ultimately amounts to very little spare “similar alley, different rats” outside his window, Morrison breaks into the equally minimalistic chorus, a cry to an unknown second person–perhaps us as the listener, perhaps a lost love, perhaps lost friends. His three voices overlapping themselves, Morrison cries “You can’t say it but I know that it’s in there/You don’t know it but I know that you’re scared/Obvious and lonely, a spider in the snow” over the now intensified (yet still constrained, auditorily) drumming. The image is clear– across a city-covering deluge of white stands the outline of a living spider, its dark form contrasting vividly against the alabaster fields, both without its fellows and immediately noticeable as such.
No official interpretation or discussion was ever released regarding “Spider in the Snow” from The Dismemberment Plan, but the meaning seems apparent. Spider in the Snow is a haunting refrain to whoever it refers to, a cry for someone stuck in social dead air, stuck in the rut of their own life, afraid of nothing ever changing (a fear apparent to their peers, hence the contrast of the spider in the snow). The few connections they’ve made are forgotten, annihilated with cerebral white-out, and all that remains is the image manifested by the song lyrics–a dead-end job, the squalor of apartment living, a pit within your chest yawning, and a complete disconnect from your peers as the years move on, all contrasted against the gloom of a frozen-over city, covered with snow. As story after story hits the press about the lack of social connection among those now entering the cusp of adulthood, the societal effects of a lack of social cohesion, and who to blame (phones, COVID, violence, etc) it seems we are given a microcosm into that loneliness from the far-flung year of 1999– a figure, who like us, is all too obvious and lonely, all too alone. The final line of verse three even provides an almost abstract call to the false salve that was the social connectedness of the internet– “How can a body move the speed of light/And still find itself in such a rut?” as fiber optic cables seemingly “connect” the entire world at the speed of light, why do so many feel like a spider in the snow?
From a personal perspective, the song feels like an anthem of my misspent years. When the lockdowns hit, I retreated, and seemingly all progress I had made in high school to become a social sort of person was annihilated. All I was able to cobble together was a discord server full of a bunch of my malcontent buddies I had collected over the years– some friends from high school, some buddies from Port St. Lucie I knew through a tenuous connection, and some random batches of whoever else wanted to hang out. And thus became my life, and what remains my life for almost 5 years running– we’re still trying to figure out what to do on our 5th anniversary of hanging out come April of 2025. How can a body move at the speed of light and still find itself in such a rut? I feel uniquely qualified to say it’s not something you apply conscious effort to. Time burns up like high-octane gas when you’re under the watchful glare of a 1080p monitor and a handful of losers with very little going on in their life. Eventually, you try to take a step out from that apartment where you watch the rats consort in the alley and find that you too have become disconnected from your peers, one more casualty of the digital age, a spider in the snow.
The Urban Poetry of “The City”
Comparatively, the opening to “The City” takes a much more complex approach– two guitars, one strumming, the other playing a riff, sets the scenery as Axelson’s drum work once more adds a groovy, jazz-esque feeling throughout the song (a groove that nearly tears itself apart with frenzy toward the outro of the song), and alongside this ecstatic setup steps in a woo-woo sounding synth, which in turn sets the stage for Morrison’s solemn vocals to pour through, once more in the spoken-word style of singing that the album has in spades. “The City” is the quintessential Emergency & I song, containing all of the album’s strongest elements of production, and making extensive use of the interpersonal anguish that lends the album such gravity, mixing both in with exquisite neo-noir lyricism describing a city, that although populated, nevertheless feels agonizingly lonely. The final cries of “All I ever say now is goodbye!/bye!/bye!/bye!” are some of the most tormented lyrics within the album, which may appear short and blunt, but when infused with Morrison’s clear and intense vocals, seem to shake the record with the power of his sorrows.
Once more, “The City” is left without an official statement regarding its meaning, but one can be almost certain of some of the broader points. Certainly, it is about a lover walking out of the subject’s life– lines refer to the emptiness of the protagonist’s bed, being unable to provide for another’s wants, and attempting to discern why exactly the protagonist’s former lover left. Although the lyrics were written before Morrison’s relationship with his girlfriend ended (if the 2011 reissue liner notes present an accurate chronology), it cannot be held in doubt that such an event would undoubtedly influence the recording, and in rough terms, the emotion in Morrison’s voice throughout the song. This is not a breakup song, it is a post-breakup song, reckoning with absence after the initial emotional shock (further reflecting Morrison’s commitment to escaping the petty struggles of youth that motivated much of punk’s lyricism), and a beautiful array of poetry presenting itself through architecture. Verse two contains one of the most striking depictions of the particular feeling of alienation that city living can give in someone already predisposed to melancholy–
“Sometimes I stand on my roof at night/And watch as something seems to happen somewhere else/I feel like the breeze could pick me up and carry me away/Out and over the iridescent grid/Up and away from the bar fights and neon lights/And out and away from everything that makes me what I am”
Completely disconnected from his own life, he watches on in envy as the various other city dwellers seem to be able to simply live. The fact they are capable of being present, that their lives are filled with “bar fights and neon lights” rather than the emptiness that composes the narrator is a reason for envy, a reason for being a voyeur into a world of social cohesion, free of depressive isolation. The unspoken breakup that hangs over the entire song has torn open the narrator, left him with nothing but a disassociated sadness wherein he wishes he could shed all of his problems and simply hang above the earth, an asocial neon-tinted angel surveying the hordes of lovers and fighters, all the people who are capable of having life happen to them.
Further compounding this dissociative melancholy that is filtered into every lyric is his vivid description of the world in the absence of his lover– now bereft of something to focus on, someone to love, he takes notice of how truly lonely the city is without the ability to interact with others– although teeming with people, he feels entirely alone (although the song primarily concerns a lover leaving, he remarks that his telephone is entirely silent as well, indicating the presence of few if any friends.), leaving him to ponder on nothing but the desolation of a city that lacks anyone to speak to. These architectural observations wander broadly across various urban landscapes as he remarks “Now I notice the streetlamps hum/the ghosts of graffiti they couldn’t quite erase/ the blank-faced stares on the subway as people go home.” The narrator is surrounded in effect by ghosts– the ghost of light that manifests as sound, marks left behind by other people that cannot entirely be destroyed, and the drained and exhausted workers unable or unwilling to speak to him within a crowded subway car. Although he is surrounded by all indicators of a thriving city environment, by the teeming masses of people who could provide some company in a subway car or through the urban communion of street art, he is inescapably alone, a ghost himself in the face of the breakup, one more empty face within an empty city.
Similar to “Spider In The Snow” the themes of loneliness strike my chords something fierce in this song– it’s one of my favorites from the album to listen to on repeat, just sit in bed and listen to the amazing intermingling of new age synth and the excellent indie rock stylings that are at their best in this song, absorb the poetry of the lyrics and imagine the narrator’s vision of the world with my eyes closed. Although a romantic undertone was present to me while I listened, I always associated the song with the loss of friends, whether purposeful or through social erosion, watching as time and distance made our texts more infrequent, and conversations shorter. Those who left my life, bit by bit, mile by mile, or those whose lives I left for my own reasons. No one expects every friendship to last forever, but when scrolling through a list of names on my contacts page, looking for someone to hang out with in a dark, lonesome room and wading through a marsh of those who I no longer speak to, who no longer live close by, who no longer wish to speak to me, I can’t help but feel Morrison’s crying voice of “all I ever say now is goodbye!” Jacksonville, as many of you know, is not a city that particularly lends itself to much in the way of social intercourse that I imagine more populous cities do, and when I wandered around downtown on a Saturday afternoon and found myself walking for five minutes before I ran into another person, one can’t help but think that Morrison is correct in stating that the city is dead. One can only hope for that same breeze to lift them over this sprawling, but ultimately empty city, and to see life happen somewhere, because it certainly isn’t happening to you.
This has been the first post of Twin Falls: Music and Memories, and it’s been a pleasure to write for those of you who took the time to wade through my self-indulgent reflections on an indie rock album near and dear to my heart. I’ll see you next week with another review, and I hope you have a good weekend. And if you like the way I write, I go into more abbreviated details of various songs on my radio show Jacksonville Vice, airing on Spinnaker Radio, 95.5 FM WSKR, 11 AM every Monday.