Remember the Dismembered

"I guess you could call it superpowers, but no-one is going to save the world with what I've got" - 'Superpowers'

Last month Eric Axelson, bassist / keyboardist with Washington DC's The Dismemberment Plan, posted on the band's official website the news that after four albums they had decided to split. What follows is part obituary, part personal appreciation, and part a critical and alternative perspective on Olav's response to the break-up not solely motivated by bitterness that he got to the 'The Dismemberment Plan dismembered' punchline before I did...

Of course, I should begin by acknowledging that he was instrumental in my discovering them. Having read some magazine article that sparked my interest, I found an MP3 of 'What Do You Want Me To Say?' on Napster and listened to it repeatedly over the summer of 2000. Back in Nottingham, I availed myself of 1999's Emergency & I LP, and then Change when it emerged the following year. This was around the same time that I came across Clinic and their Internal Wrangler record. Both bands struck me as remarkably similar in being completely different to anything I'd ever heard before, and in different ways. Clinic somehow fashion fantastically sinister pop music from surf guitar licks, avant-garde garage punk, Merseybeat and melodica, while TDP's songs are a riot of uninhibited and colourful ideas drawn from across the musical spectrum, a victory for playfulness and imagination over stagnation and narrow-minded parasitism. In an email interview early last year, Eric told me: "I think we're inventive and ambitious, but we don't sit around thinking how to be that way. We all listen to tons of music, everything from Top 40 to underground hip-hop to punk to alternative country music. Everything, literally. And I think that's what makes us sound ambitious to people. But that's probably what happens when you're trying to write songs that sound like Kylie Minogue and Roni Size and The Band all at the same time". Careless Talk Costs Lives and former NME journalist Stevie Chick has called them "resolutely out there", and their contributions to the split EP with Desoto labelmates Juno just about sums up what they're all about (as much as any two tracks possibly could): 'The Dismemberment Plan Gets Rich', a frantic seizure of a song with an entirely gratuitous disco breakdown and lyrics about drug-running, and a frankly unbelievable cover of Jennifer Paige's 80s hit 'Crush', which turns it into possibly the most achingly gorgeous torch song I've ever heard.

So, the fact that the esteemed and discerning author of It Makes No Difference can glibly bracket TDP with such bands as The Promise Ring and Jimmy Eat World is, I confess, the source of some bewilderment. JEW deal in big-hitting emo tuneage. TPR's Very Emergency is packed full of sprightly and sparky punk-pop even leaner and cleaner than Weezer, although they threw it all away by changing gear too fast with Wood / Water which aims at sensitive reflection but sounds in the main listless and jaded. This much I agree. But both Jimmy Eat World and The Promise Ring (at their best) offer the listener the quick fix, the immediate turn-on, the instant gratification, songs that lodge themselves in your head on the first listen. All fine and well - but after a while they become too in-your-face, too shallow, too obvious. By contrast, the last two Dismemberment Plan albums are finely nuanced, rich, explorative collections which unravel seductively over time and, thrillingly, give the listener a glimpse of what music can be: "This is a life of possibility", sings Travis Morrison on Emergency & I's opening track. Olav, expressing his disappointment that Change "merely simmered", recalls the "heart-stopping anthems" of Emergency & I. No - they never stooped so low as to write anything as oafish as an 'anthem', and Change is, if anything, superior to its predecessor by virtue of avoiding, for the most part, songs which might potentially see them labelled, and thereby written off, as 'quirky'. The opening four tracks are stunning. The first line of 'The Face Of The Earth', "As kisses go, it wasn't anything out of the ordinary", itself isn't anything out of the ordinary, but the way Travis sings it gives me goosebumps every time.

What ultimately upsets and disappoints Olav is the band's failure to "capitalise" on the 'Weezer market'. It was "wasteful", he says. It IS, I think, "shallow and silly" to suggest that there is a link between this 'failure' and their decision to split up. Attempting to explain the decision, Eric wrote on their website: "The best answer we can come up with is that we felt like we'd accomplished all we could as a songwriting and recordmaking unit, and that we wanted - as individuals - to try things that can be precluded by living the lifestyle of the touring musician". The pressures of commercial 'failure' didn't come into it. The definition of success in commercial terms is a very narrow one. The Dismemberment Plan simply did not play the game and jump aboard the merry-go-round. Their major label career lasted one album. "If they weren't so damned up their own arse about it, both bands [TDP and TPR] would have had hit singles coming out of their nose" - who's to say? Who's to say if they'd had the same corporate money behind them and hype bulldozer in front of them as Jimmy Eat World, they wouldn't have become as widely popular? What can be said with some certainty is that, laudably, commercial success was not their whole raison d'etre. They didn't have hit singles and, more importantly, they didn't care.

So let's not lament wasted talent, or dwell on the 'tragedy' of their demise, but savour that legacy instead. I guess you could call it superpowers, but no-one was going to save the world with what they'd got. It's not their fault the world didn't want saving.

Links:

Interview with Travis Morrison in Stylus Magazine

Article on TDP and Juno including more from my interview with Eric