Emergency and Us.

Last week, the DC area's defunct Dismemberment Plan reissued their 1999 album, Emergency and I as a deluxe vinyl edition. I had been anticipating this ever since I heard the news, nearly six months ago. Pitchfork, whose reviews range from the pedantic to the florid, often in the same paragraph, astutely gave it an unequivocal 10.0 on their comically nitpicking ratings system, an act of justifiable homage to 'lightning in a bottle' greatness, and also a final atonement for giving Travis Morrison's subsequent solo album a savagely unjust 0.0 just years later.

Artistic squabbles and buried hatchets aside, Emergency and I is a game-changer. Even now, the hyper bass lines, Weezer on 'roids guitar buzzing and Morrison's lyrics don't feel the slightest bit dated. It's a consoling record. The songs deal with issues like losing friends, loved-ones, death, depression, and human fragility, all while sounding like nothing more than pages read from a intensely personal diary scribble. The album's title foreshadowed the underlying anxieties of the past decade. Remember that, in 1999, things like Homeland Security, terror alerts, and 'Don't touch my junk,' airport utterances were nonexistent. The Bush Presidency debacle, and the era of aggrandized mass-fear mongering didn't weigh on our collective conscience.

The personal is always political, though. The Dismemberment Plan didn't create from the outside in, but the exact inverse; their anxieties were more micro than macro, but it's in the small insecurities we all deal intently. Songs like 'Spider in the Snow' and 'The Jitters,' with others' laughter making you sick, and having to force yourself to brush your teeth and exercise, are monumental under the weight of depression that's too burdensome to be analyzed, or too familiar to register as anything by numbingly exoteric. In Morrison's world, party invitations get lost in the mail, the earth gets annihilated with nukes, and the only obvious response is: We'd better go underground, start handing out the shovels and dig. A grudging positivity, expressed through one-foot-in-front-of-the-other momentum guides every lament.

It's not without its humor, either. 'Girl O' Clock,' and 'What Do You Want Me To Say' are fantastic accounts of being misunderstood in relationships, and of irrepressible feelings of sexual frustration. 'There's injuns over every goddamn hill,' sings Morrison on the latter song, finally coming to realize a romance warmed-over. My favorite line, that preceded the internet, social networks, and 24-hour news-blather is from 'Spider': 'How can a body move at the speed of light, and still find itself in such a rut?' You've felt that way, I've felt that way; we've all wondered the same question. The song is distractingly jaunty, and always imbued with a queasy sense of dislocation that settles in the pit of your stomach like a cold burrito.

Emergency and I is an album of stark honesty that makes me feel like I'm understood, a desire I naively thought I might have outgrown by now, that keeps giving of itself, a true rarity and something to be especially prized, savored, and cherished. It's possible that the band didn't know they were making something that would touch so many people so profoundly. In the liner notes, Morrison essentially admits as much. They never replicated the soaring triumph of Emergency and I, and it's to their credit that their follow-up, and final album never really bothered. An album that acknowledges humanity so broadly while making you feel okay about it is something far beyond the sum of three guys emoting together in a room, and unquestionably deserves to be heard, now more than ever.