Brian Schanck was 15 years old when a friend played him Emergency & I, the third album by The Dismemberment Plan. “The music was euphonious and the lyrics hit home,” he says, recalling the D.C. indie rock band’s oddball pairing of funk rhythms and emo narrative. He dug it.

When Schanck turned 18, he tattooed the album’s cover art—abstract cartoons doodled by the band’s singer, Travis Morrison—on his ribcage beneath his right arm. He started playing bass in bands in the Tampa, Fla., area.

Schanck, now 24, has since made some regrettable decisions—he’s currently serving a three-year sentence in a Florida prison for a drunk-driving conviction—but he stands by his ink.

“[I liked] how diverse and eccentric they were,” he says, answering questions sent via Facebook and posed over the phone by his parents. “How intriguing the time signatures were, how Travis sang, and how amazing they were as musicians. They had no barriers, [the music] seemed crazy but created comfort.”

He cites his favorite lyrics, from “Spider in the Snow”: “The only thing worse than bad memories is no memories at all.”

An album’s legacy can’t be measured in permanent ink alone, but more than a decade after its release, it’s clear that Emergency & I struck a special chord. Since the group disbanded in 2003, the record has accrued cult-like adoration—the kind of indie-kid love fest otherwise reserved for bands like Neutral Milk Hotel and Pixies. People remember where, when, and who they were with when they first turned it on. They climbed in vans and followed the band on tour, Grateful Dead-style. Fans didn’t just love it; they lived it.

And for some reason, now there are more of them than ever.

To commemorate the release of a remastered, double-LP version of Emergency & I, The Dismemberment Plan is getting back together for a string of concerts. After seven years of relative inactivity—they reunited for a pair of benefit shows in 2007—the band will play to capacity crowds in venues it might have struggled to fill in its peak years. In 2003, the Plan could pack one night at Chicago’s Metro. This time around, two shows there have already sold out. So have gigs at the Black Cat on Jan. 21 and the 9:30 Club on Jan. 22 and 23.

Emergency & I’s appeal is easy to parse. It’s a high-energy and high-emotion record—an album that softened mid-20s angst with self-deprecation and noodle-dance-ready beats. It also showed up at the right time. Released in 1999, Emergency & I caught the music industry at a crossroads—it was paid for by a fading major label, yet popularized, at least in part, through the explosion of music culture on the Internet. Jimmy Iovine wrote the checks. Napster and Pitchfork got the word out. The band, which had long toiled at the margins, finally got some fans.

The Plan formed in 1993, and its sound congealed from contradictory impulses. The rhythm section—Eric Axelson on bass and, eventually, Joe Easley on drums—skewed funky. Guitarist Jason Caddell played fuzzy and jittery riffs. Morrison spit out lyrics like post-punk’s answer to the Micro Machines man. “We felt kinship with bands like Brainiac, and Enon after them,” says Caddell. “Any band that was trying to take a bunch of different music streams and see how convoluted they could twist them together.”

In a landscape populated by dour men with giant amps, the band stuck out. “They had this Technicolor, DayGlo, ultra-colorful sound that contrasted with gun-metal-gray tonalities of the time, particularly in D.C.,” says Beauty Pill founder Chad Clark, who co-produced Emergency & I.

By the time the band released The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, its second album, in 1997, it had built a modest following. Major-label ears perked up and, around that time, the band signed to Interscope. It was able to record for three weeks at a pricey studio—Water Music in Hoboken, N.J.—and hire Clark and Jawbox founder J. Robbins to produce.

But it became clear Emergency & I was not a huge priority for Interscope, which was then being batted around amid a series of corporate mergers. “‘Ice of Boston’ was the main hook for Interscope,” theorizes Clark, who says the label pushed for the song, which was already on Is Terrified, to be included on the next record. “The banana-in-the-ear, wacky, zany, alt-rock hit was a viable way to get a band noticed back then. My feeling was they were dismayed by increasingly serious character of the Plan’s music.”

Interscope dropped the band, which got an unusually good deal—the label returned the master tapes and let the Plan keep the advance. After a year of waiting, Emergency & I came out on D-Plan’s longtime indie home, DeSoto, in 1999.

It wasn’t an immediate smash. Emergency & I gradually percolated into popularity through traditional means—fanzines, extensive touring, some print write-ups. But the record was also among the first wave of indie records to see tangible benefits from the Internet.

Emergency & I arrived in the year of Napster, which made MP3s of the record easily available to college students who had noticed the buzz. The band maintained a presence on the then-newfangled MySpace and frequently updated its website. Fan-run sites like Knerd (now defunct) also posted—unbeknownst to the band—a few free, downloadable bootlegs of concerts. “We benefited from being on the cusp of the first true Internet generation,” says Caddell. “Kids who from childhood were conversant in the language and used it as an intense cultural resource.”

Emergency & I didn’t get much traction with glossy music magazines, but indie-oriented music sites paid attention. “Now get ready—I’m gonna gush because I’m embarrassed I didn’t put this on my top 10 list and because they deserve it,” wrote Sarah Zupko in Popmatters. Pitchfork Media gave the record a full-bore super-endorsement. “I could spend pages examining this record,” wrote Brent DiCrescenzo. “Everything down to the art is stunningly unique and perfectly appropriate.” He published a more direct review at the top of the page: “If you consider yourself a fan of groundbreaking pop, go out and buy this album right now.” The website named it record of the year in 1999. (Disclosure: I’ve written for Pitchfork since 2007.)

Web hype, however strong, doesn’t account for Emergency & I’s long-term resonance. The songs sold themselves. “It’s too simple to say songwriting got better,” says Josh Modell, editor of the Onion AV Club, who compiled an oral history for the vinyl release. “They calmed down. The weirder, goofier elements balanced out with serious lyrics.”

Morrison edged away from straight-up wackiness and applied his playful, self-effacing sense of humor to more adult themes. Songs like “A Life of Possibilities” captured the free-flowing aimlessness of post-college doldrums. “The title sounds bright, but it’s a dark and surreal story,” explains Clark. “It’s a life of possibilities, but one of those possibilities is that nobody gives a fuck about you.” It’s a coming-of-age record set halfway between Shudder to Think and Jimmy Jam.

Morrison is a little self-conscious about the lyrics now and laments their unambiguity. “You know on ‘Once in a Lifetime,” where David Byrne is singing, ‘There is water at the bottom of the ocean,’ and you’re, like, ‘Why is he saying that?’ There aren’t a lot of those moments,” he says. “But at least the single entendres are fully felt.” Morrison cops to listening to a lot of pop country at the time, keying in on the songwriter’s ability to generate a linear narrative. “Country is not interested in the sublime at all. The story is told and you relate to the story,” he says. “Nobody was writing stuff like that in our context.”

That much is true. But The Dismemberment Plan, thankfully, did not play sad songs and waltzes. Part of what sells Morrison’s über-earnest songwriting is the context—“Memory Machine,” with its foreboding, angsty vibe, is presented not as singer-songwriter mulch, but atop an odd time Meters-informed bass hook.

“It was like going to a party and they’re playing four different stereos,” says Robbins. “One guy is DJing Daft Punk, another Stevie Wonder, and another Radiohead. The synthesis worked, even though there were a lot of times where the right hand had no idea what the left hand was doing.”

Photo courtesy The Dismemberment Plan/Illustration by Brooke Hatfield

Sleigh Bells: Hipster-hop party yelps salted with butt-rock guitar riffs. Not the revolution.

Moon Duo, Pocahaunted, and No Age after the jump

Moon Duo: Wooden Shjips guitarist Ripley Johnston and a young lady with a keyboard poured stoner-haze over drum machine loops during the WFMU showcase at Encore. The discerning record nerd would recognize subtle nods to vintage psych, as well as lo-fi trance legends like Spacemen 3, Suicide, and Loop. But if you weren't keyed in to the band's reference points, you might have just thought you were watching a guy with a wizard beard practice guitar solos.

Pocahaunted: Part freak-folk throw-down, part pagan rite, and part thrift-store costume party, Pocahaunted's performance at the Not Not Fun showcase was weirdly uplifting. Think Tom Tom Club jamming with Sun Ra.

No Age: The L.A. based space-punk band played a surprise set at the Ecstatic Peace showcase Friday night, doing new stuff from it's upcoming LP. A new guy, working the nobs on a sampler, filled out the duo's stripped-down sound nicely. You can't help feel a little bad for him, though. It's hard to be the guy tasked with twisting an FX-send on a mixer while the rest of your band is rocking-out.

Also seen: Dam Funk, Sex Worker, Wet Hair, Eternal Tapestry

Saturday Recap: Nada. Nothing. I had to catch a plane at 6 am, so I missed (Insert sad emoticon here).

Deleted Scenes: Having rolled into town in the wee hours of the morning, Deleted Scenes was looking a little worse for the wear at yesterday's show. But however disheveled they were, the bar–a grimy sports dive about a mile out of Austin–had them beat. True troopers, they delivered a pretty good set anyway. New songs threw some double-kick drum and Casio DG-20 into the band's spacey indie-rock.

Yellow Fever: Slant 6 and Quix-o-tic frontwoman Christina Billotte had one of the best singing voices of the early '90s–equal parts bored and bluesy. But she's M.I.A. these days, so Austin's Yellow Fever will have to do. The duo–with its eerie melodies and spare instrumentation–is an adequate stand in, though. The crowded tent at the Other Music showcase was probably the wrong place to hear them. Better to catch Yellow Fever in somebody's living room, where they would be spared the competition of a chatty 100 person-strong bathroom line.

More after the jump

Dum Dum Girls: Juxtaposed against the sweaty mid-afternoon masses, L.A.'s Dum Dum Girls–clad in black dresses, dark sunglasses, and heavy lipstick–looked like they had been beamed in from another planet. Or perhaps plucked from Elvira's pencil box. The band's set at the Other Music showcase was drenched in reverb, so much so that apart from the word "baby" it was hard to decipher any of the band's lyrics. But between the clothes, the hair, and the band's gothy girl-pop message came across perfectly clear.

Love of Diagrams: Back for its first U.S. tour since 2007, Melbourne, Australia's Love of Diagrams performed a set drawn largely from its new record Nowhere Forever. I liked it, but they're friends, so take that as you will. The new stuff is heavy and expansive–a grittier take on '90s shoegaze legends like Ride. Buddies or no, I don't think there's any arguing that Love of Diagrams have the best rhythm section in the Southern Hemisphere.

Explode Into Colors: I only caught five-minutes of this set, but what I heard I like. All-girl post-punk heavy on the percussion–a modern answer to ESG with a bit of dancehall reggae flavor.

Ray Davies: I showed up to La Zona Rosa early in order to wait around for the Roky Erickson (see below) with no idea who else was playing. At first I thought somebody was playing Kinks covers, but it turned out to be the real thing. Davies played most of the set accompanied by another guitarist, but at the end a full backing band came on stage to belt out a few of the hits.

Roky Erickson & Okkervil River: Having watched the Roky Erickson documentary, I'm slightly bewildered that anybody could get him on stage at all. Austin folk-rockers Okkervil River succeeded, somehow. I had high hopes that they'd hit the stage with a killer version of "Slip Inside This House." That may have bit a bit of a lofty expectation. Who knows, though, they may have played it–since it was already 2am, I didn't stick around too long. The band did do a pretty good take of "Two Headed Dog" and Erikson still sounds pretty unchained, although he would have sounded more so had been willing to sing directly into the mic.

Also seen: Real Estate, The XX

Tennis System: Apparently Tennis System had a rough trip down to Texas. According to guitarist/singer Matty Taylor the band's shows in Richmond and Lexington were shut down by the cops before it could finish its first two songs. Noise complaints, apparently. That's bad news gas money-wise, but it's great for myth-building, I guess. The sound-guy at Rusty Spur, Tennis System's first SXSW gig, wasn't exactly draconian about noise, but he did make the band back the volume knobs off of the Dinosaur Jr.-setting. Some dude who looked like Kid Rock's younger, skeezier, brother sat at the bar four the first few songs and bobbed his head.

Hozac Records, The Walkmen, and Flying Lotus after the jump.

Hozac Records Showcase (Rayon Beach/The Girls at Dawn: Everybody at this showcase, held at Austin's Trailer Space Records, looked kind of like a Peter Bagge drawing. That's appropriate, though, given Hozac's catalog of slanted and gritty garage-rock singles. Austin-based trio Rayon Beach opened the show–delay drenched vocals trying to muscle their way through a wall of fuzz. If a better there's a better band riffing on The Urinals' legacy right now, I cannot name it. The Girls at Dawn played some O.K. teen-girl-zombie pop, too.

The Walkmen: Apparently the New York City-via-Washington, D.C. indie-rock band has been hard at work on its fifth record. They dropped a few new songs into the set at Stubbs BBQ last night, but had lead singer Hamilton Leithauser not called them out as such, I would not have noticed. The Walkmen's schtick–heavy reverb guitar, heavy reverb organ, super-solid drummer–is still intact. Leithauser's singing still strives to locate the middle ground between Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra. Not bad.

Beaches: Five Australian women–three guitars, bass, and drums–playing scrappy instrumentals after a whole afternoon spent drinking. Sort of like listening to three copies of The Clean's Compilation simultaneously. In my book, if you band has three guitars, you can't fail.

Warp Showcase (Flying Lotus):
Overheard while waiting for Flying Lotus to take the stage: "These guys are the Dream Theater of electronic music." Those words–spoken by an audience member at the Warp Records showcase–are pretty right on. If Warp's recent crop of beatmakers has anything in common with prog rock, it's that they share the credo "More is more." L.A.'s Flying Lotus, who headlined, packed his 40-minute set with dense instrumental hiphop run through a laptop Cuisinart. It's hard to look like a rock star while you're working knobs on a computer, but Flying Lotus kept a good rapport with the audience, periodically halting the onslaught to tease a crowd predominantly composed of journalists. "Make sure you tweet that Flying Lotus is killing shit right now," he said.

I spent most of the day just en route. Last year I took two extra days off and drove to SXSW with some friends. It was an OK road trip–we stayed in some crusty motels and spent a day in Nashville. This year, for convenience's sake, I decided to cough up the cash for a plane ticket. Anyway, I'll spare you the further details of my passage.

Same with the afternoon, which was mostly tacos and naps.

My host, former City Paper City Lights editor Mike Kanin, invited me to sit-in with his psych/noise/improv band Expensive Shit at a pre-festival show they were playing. For 14-minutes I tried to do my best Hawkwind-era Lemmy impersonation, but my three-quarter scale bass–once owned by former City Paper Arts Editor and indie-pop enthusiast Leonard Roberge–wasn't really having it. I had a good time, though.

(Expensive Shit photo by Alexis Wolstein)

-Since he's legally forbidden to perform comedy on television, Conan O'Brien is hitting the road this spring. He'll be in D.C. at Constitution Hall on June 8th.

-The Washington Post's Dave Malitz profiles four up-and-coming bands that will be visiting D.C. on tour. He shines some light on a few locals, too.

Baltimore City Paper profiles cosmic-voyager Dam Funk, who will be performing tomorrow at 411 New York Ave. NE.

-SPIN has made all of its back-issues available via google books. I particularly enjoyed this article, where critic Robert Christgau and Matador Records founder Gerard Cosloy argue over whether Royal Trux has the right to exist.

*The Washington Post's Monica Hesse profiles Cruella DeVille. Wait, I'm sorry, that's bestselling romance writer Danielle Steele. Apparently she has a pretty great sense of humor.

*The battle over the future of streaming music sites is heating up. Will revenue be subscription or ad-based? Will people prefer nested applications or clouds? Will musicians actually get a dime out of it? The Guardian weighs the pros and cons of subscription-based streaming music sites MOG and Spotify. If you live in The United States then the battle is already won, though. Spotify is not yet available to Americans.

*Comic-book stores are rife with manga cuties, but if you're looking for illustrated smut with an intellectual edge Slate just reviewed a graphic novel interpretation of Story of the O.

A scene from the film Ghosts Don't Exist.

For Carol Bidault, the founder and executive director of the D.C. Independent Film Festival, the last few years have been rough. Miramax and Warner Independent, major pipelines between small filmmakers and the mainstream, have been shut down by their corporate parents. They were both sponsors of her festival, as were NBC, Cablevision, JVC, and Avid—all of which balked this year, distancing themselves from the indie world they fought for a piece of a decade ago.

So cut, cut, cut. Cheaper printers. A cheaper venue than last year (the Naval Heritage Center instead of Union Station). And Bidault’s had to fill the sponsorship hole with private donations—the film-fest equivalent of a bake sale.

But those are the only ways the festival is downsizing. It’s still presenting lots of pictures—100 and change, with 27 foreign countries represented. This year’s themed sessions, meanwhile, cover a typical swath: You’ve got your Latin cinema, your comedies, and your horror—the latter noteworthy for one glorious absurdity in particular, Ghosts Don’t Exist. But there’s also Urban-omics, a slate of films on inner-city issues, and Senior Moments, a cluster that pokes fun at the elderly. Then there are individual joys: The Be All End All, in which a terminally ill teen looks to get laid; Poi Dogs, a genre exercise tracing a love affair between two plus-size Hawaiians; and Odysseus and the Cyclops, a two-minute cartoon by the festival’s youngest entrant, 7-year-old Emily Salva. It’s a testament to the inclusive vibe DCIFF maintains, even in straitened times.

"Filmmakers already get marginalized," Bidault says. "Why should we for budgetary reasons or thematic reasons, or even age-related reasons, add to that?" —Ted Scheinman

The festival runs March 4 to 14; films show at the Naval Heritage Center, 701 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. See dciff.org for times and Arts Desk for more reviews.

Dive!
With an appropriately spare $200 budget, Dive! explores freeganism, a subculture of people who eat food others consider trash. Director Jeremy Seifert and his family live almost entirely on discarded goods. He grapples with the consumer culture that leads to widespread food waste, contacting stores to ask why so much usable food ends up in Dumpsters. —Ryan Little

Odysseus and the Cyclops
Seven-year-old Emily Salva’s Odysseus and the Cyclops is a surprisingly watchable two-minute cartoon that retells the well-known Greek myth. Emily’s father, Mike Salva, animated her drawings, and her narration is adorable. —Ryan Little

Heartland Transport
This documentary follows several queer couples as they rush to Iowa to get hitched while the law still allows it. Cody Stokes’ subjects are genuine, and the post-trip marital ceremonies are touching. Still, with only seven minutes of footage, the film leaves you wondering what happens next. —Ryan Little

Ghosts Don’t Exist
If you’re a fan of so-bad-they’re-good flicks like The Room, the poorly executed horror that is Ghosts Don’t Exist might be up your alley. Eric Espejo’s directorial debut depicts a retiring ghost hunter who gets the call to go on one last job with the promise he’ll both make contact with his dead wife and finally have proof of the supernatural. The dialogue is corny enough to make George Lucas cringe, and the melodramatic score only reinforces the over-the-top acting. The awkwardly long shots and too-dark cinematography are like a CSI episode gone wrong, but the plot is unpredictable enough to keep you watching this train wreck until the end. —Ryan Little

I Am a Man: From Memphis, A Lesson in Life
Elmore Nickleberry has a dirty job. A Memphis, Tenn., sanitation worker, he’s hauled the city’s trash for more than four decades. Nickleberry raised his family in the ’60s, amid the civil rights struggle. Fed up with discrimination and dangerous working conditions, he joined his fellow workers in Memphis’ 1968 sanitation strike—letting the trash pile up for 64 days until city officials acquiesced to sanitation workers’ demands for union membership and wage increases. Don’t call him a garbage man, though. He’s a man, plain and simple, and he fought hard to be known as such. —Aaron Leitko

The Be All End All
Equal parts humorous and heartwarming, Bruce Webb’s The Be All End All is the story of Robbie, a terminally ill British 15-year-old desperately trying to jettison his virginity even though he can’t leave the hospital. But as his best friend, Ziggy, jumps through absurd hoops to find the right girl for the job, it’s their friendship, not Robbie’s goal, that’s a joy to watch. —Ryan Little

Poi Dogs
In writer-director Joel Moffatt’s cutesy, slightly scattershot short, two heavyset Hawaiian teenagers—he a football player on a busted moped, she a tuba player with some engineering chops—flirt, kind of, following a game. The setting is spacious and post-industrial and shot from low angles in a high-gravity frame; the tone, meanwhile, is light, inhabiting that early moment of adolescence that’s lured by romance but defensively too cool for it. More tone-poem than narrative exercise, Poi Dogs angles for both the playfulness of Jacques Tati—hence a recurring, circuslike tuba vamp—and the harsh realism of, say, a David Gordon Green or Ramin Bahrani. The coda, though, is all Wes Anderson: hence that tuba theme set to the pop-punk gang vocals of "Hey Baby," which send the vintage moped, shot in twee-dramatic slow-mo, riding toward its destiny. —Jonathan L. Fischer

Agnes Day

Stryder Simms’ short is the sort of thing cinéastes describe as "impressionistic": a series of starkly wrought images whose flimsy relation to one another audiences will forgive because the story, insofar as it is one, involves the death of a child. Witness here a pony-tailed priest blessing a jar of bees; cold breezes flitting through Southwestern fields; bare bedrooms lit by autumnal daylight; and wide-eyed twin siblings, around ages 7 or 8, who make for exquisitely cute mourner and corpse. The music, a ghostly chorale by Samuel Barber, suggests the kind of art-house exercise frequently satirized by smarter filmmakers working in comedy. I was reminded of another painfully overwrought film that said far too little to merit its masturbatory aesthetic, The Desert Within, a Mexican title from 2008 that took two hours to murder all but one of its many underage characters, all in the service of proving that God is dead. There’s a reason you haven’t heard of either film. —Jonathan L. Fischer

Say goodbye tonight and then check back tomorrow when Munoz tells Arts Desk about calling it quits.

Pash w/ Typefighter and Olivia Mancini
Black Cat
8:30 pm $8
1811 14th St. NW

All Our Noise recently interviewed guitarist Erik Bruner-Yang, check it out here.

Erik Bruner-Yang: Pash Interview1 from Denman C Anderson on Vimeo.

*Pitchfork managing editor Mark Richardson just completed a 33 & 1/3 book about The Flaming Lips' 1997 record Zaireeka. He chats with Fluxblog about the joys of listening to an album that can only be heard on four stereos at once

*The Guardian's music blog thinks the internet has had a detrimental effect on rock-star mystique. "We are in danger of losing the enigma of the rock star," writes Mark Beaumont. "You only have to stand Grizzly Bear next to pop stars like Dizzee Rascal, Florence Welch, or Lady Gaga in her blowtorch bra to see that the mainstream has gazumped alt-rock in terms of retina-frying freakishness."

*The New York Times reports that actor Andrew Koenig–known to millions as Boner from the '80s sitcom Growing Pains–has been found dead in a Vancouver, Canada park.

*Baltimore City Paper music editor Michael Byrne thinks we jumped the shark with that Fan Death/butt-hurt piece. "It was kinda funny, but mainly just helped prove Gray's point," he writes on the paper's Noise blog.