The City's Been Dead Since You've Been Gone

Why is the music world so in love with nostalgia?  Each new release day is littered with re-releases.  Bonus tracks added!  First time on vinyl!  Newly remastered from the original analog tapes!  Record companies will do anything to get we, the consumers, to purchase stuff that we've already purchased previously.  It's really genius marketing.  Resell the customer something that he or she already owns by adding only a few bells and whistles (usually tracks that are available on the web if you search hard enough).  In this day and age of MP3s, concrete media (vinyl, CDs) and heading toward extinction at a breakneck pace.  There are just too many people who haven't fallen in love with the physical feel of holding an album in your hands, taking the vinyl out of its sleeve and catching the aroma of freshly pressed wax, thumbing through a CD booklet, reading liner notes, peeling open the wrapper... it's like food porn, but with music. 
No matter how one tries to intellectualize it, music obsessives can't help but be nostalgic.  We want, no,  need, to obtain everything that an artist has committed to tape, no matter how terrible or insignificant those recordings are (it's not a perfect example, but see the Bob Dylan Bootleg Series 1-3 for plenty of tracks that should have remained hidden in Columbia's vaults).  Many will argue that demos and unreleased tracks are an excellent way to recreate an artist's thought process by closely examining what was left on the cutting room floor.  Many people would be wrong on most occasions.  But let's reward those who, because of the era that their magnum opus was released, can repackage their music merely for the sake of getting it out there on vinyl for the first time... with 4 bonus tracks that are easily found elsewhere.
In 1999, the indie music landscape was littered with disparate styles.  Emo was reaching a peak, with bands like The Get Up Kids, Modest Mouse, Pedro the Lion, and Jimmy Eat World selling album after album of whiny, derivative drivel.  Meanwhile, bands that would reach fantastic heights in the 2000s put out albums that would define their sound, such as The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin, Sigur Ros' Agaetis Byrjun, The Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs, Slow Riot for New Zero Kanada by God Speed! You Black Emperor, and The White Stripes' self-titled album.  Wilco dropped their Beach Boys-worshipping Summerteeth, Beck dove head-first into white boy funk with Midnite Vultures, The Hot Rock by Sleater-Kinney pushed their sound away from Riot Grrrl and toward the future, while Tom Waits' Mule Variations put his junkyard percussion into a retro-blues suit fit for the mainstream.  Pavement recorded and released its swan song, Terror Twilight, which still seems forced.  It was clear that Radiohead was the most important band in indie rock (by quite a margin), but their twin forays into electronics, Kid A and Amnesiac, would not appear until 2000 and 2001, respectively.  The ripples that they put into the water with 1997's OK Computer were trying to be copied left and right - to no avail.  Then along came Travis Morrison, Jason Caddell, Eric Axelson, and Joe Easley with an album that sounded very out of place to my ears at the time, but sounds timeless now.
The Dismemberment Plan were really nothing more than Washington D.C. also-rans, living on the outskirts of the post-hardcore scene, which very recently had been abandoned by Ted Leo as he disbanded the flag wavers of the scene - Chisel.  They had put out a few records on DeSoto over the preceding 5 years, but really hadn't made much noise on the scene.  Emergency & I was released on October 26, 1999 and was immediately met with rave reviews.  I was encouraged to check out the band (whom I had never heard of) by my guide through everything cool on the music scene at the time, KB.  Since KB had moved from Buffalo to the hustle and bustle of New York City (with a boyfriend in the music biz at the time), she had much more exposure to the cutting edge than I (not to mention, I was drowning in the work of my first semester of medical school).  When she suggested this record, I immediately went out and bought it (and was surprised to find it at New World Record).
On the first few spins, I didn't get it.  It was too obtuse, too fast and noisy in places, changed tempos waaaay too often and quickly.  "What Do You Want Me To Say" worked for me right away, the rest, not so much.  But it seemed to seep in day after day after day.  Right when it started to really take hold, it got pushed out of the way by Kid A and Turn On The Bright Lights. 
Fast forward to the end of 2010 - it's announced that Emergency & I would be pressed for the first time on wax.  A double 180g affair that sent me back to rediscover an album that never got its due on my play lists - it didn't even exist on my iPod.  What I found was something that had gone from sounding way left of center to sounding eerily prescient of what indie rock had become.  It predicted the math rock boom.  It incorporated Radiohead's knob-twiddling with the best elements of emo (yes, emo has its moments).
The songs are stellar top to bottom.  There's no extended intro to the album - Travis Morrison hits you right up front at the outset in "A Life of Possibilities" - as the band burns through cathartic song after cathartic song, all centered around what sounds like a break up that has forced the narrator to a city that is cold and empty without the former object of his affection.  "8 1/2 Minutes" is especially emblematic of this, as the singer frantically asks, "What were you doing for those 8 1/2 minutes?", knowing that he doesn't want to know the answer. 
Besides the lyrical content, the album's angularity and variety are its other secret weapons.  Try counting the beat in "Gyroscope" with its 15/16 time signature - i've tried and still can't seem to keep up - and yet, the song is just joyous sounding while being dour ("Happiness is such hard work and it gets harder every day").  "The City" moves along with strange, yet apropos synth lines set up by intricate drum fills, but again, finds the rock bottom feelings of the narrator ("The city's been dead, since you been gone" and "All I ever say now is goodbye").  The secret weapon here is Joe Easley's drumming.  On this record, he stakes his claim as indie rock's Neal Peart, moving the beat in different time signatures and directions seamlessly and cleanly.  That the band's angular time changes remind me of Rush's trademark flow is a testament to how tight the playing is on the album.  "You Are Invited" is sparse, haunting, and, possibly, the only positive song on the record, as Morrison sings of the search for community in party after party in a city where one feels so alone.  The lonely, ascending guitar arpeggio from the opening minutes echo Robyn Hitchcock's "Autumn Is Your Last Chance", another desolate, lonely tune.  I'm not sure that a group of post-punk indie kids was listening to much 1980s psych-folk, but the shared DNA is striking.  "The Jitters" gives the listener just that, as icy computer noise mixes with twittering synthesizers in the record's most Kid A-like moment.
There's clearly a time and place for looking back, even in the hipster world of indie rock.  We might not have decade after decade to reflect upon, but those of us in our 30s do still long for the time when we were floating through college and grad school, still forming our identities and seeking out new musical horizons.  That an album from just over 11 years ago stirs these memories, makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and gives me that butterflies-in-the-stomach-feeling that true love does, isn't an accident at all.  It's just what good music is supposed to do.  Call it nostalgia if you must, but it's great to have Emergency & I back at the forefront of my musical psyche, fitting in like that missing puzzle piece that hides under the couch.  I'm glad that others haven't forgotten about it and clued me in to what I had nearly lost.  All you have to do is remember... and listen...