Love them or hate them-- for there are few who find themselves between these extremes-- The Dismemberment Plan were an undeniably forward-thinking band, innovative without sacrificing accessibility, and always looking to forge new ground. It's possible that their tendency to continually transform themselves hastened their breakup, which, if you haven't been following the indie rock newswires, has been in progress for nearly a year now. The band realized there was no point in repeating themselves, and once they reached the point where they might be in danger of it, they closed up shop, though they kept touring on their existing material for months after officially calling it quits last month.
As their final creative stroke, the Plan have left us with this: an album of remixes created by their fans (and a few by better-known colleagues). Around this time last year, the band posted separate tracks for each of their songs on their official website so that anybody anywhere would be able to conveniently download and refashion them as they saw fit. The band then sifted through the results and chose twelve of them for this final send-off, the appropriately titled A People's History of The Dismemberment Plan. It's an opportunity I think more bands should offer to their fans, as it has potential not just to yield interesting results, but to expose talent within their fanbases.
The only question that remains, then, is how much of this has the Plan's own remix project accomplished? There's not a simple answer to that, but I can say this: some of these remixes are truly excellent, and some of them are disastrous. Certainly, it was inevitable that this project would yield mixed results, given the lack of guidelines for those involved, but it's a shame that the quality couldn't have been more uniformly high.
The disc, unfortunately, gets off on the wrong foot, with a strange remix of "Face of the Earth" by a guy calling himself Parae, who, according to the disc's liner notes, had never even heard the band before completing the track. It's an interesting vocal cutup, but folks expecting finished results anywhere even remotely close to the original material will be immediately let down, and more importantly, Parae's rhythmic sequencing of Travis Morrison's breathing patterns and snatches of syllables wander for too long before he introduces his climax, a blast of frozen, sampled guitar and percussion. That this was chosen for inclusion-- let alone to lead the record-- is a classic case of concept trumping execution.
There are a few fantastic reimaginings here, though. Drop Dynasty's "What Do You Want Me to Say?" is squirmy, electro-damaged hip-hop that keeps the original's verses intact but steers way left of the anthemic chorus, approximating the effect instead with a backward sample of Morrison and dropping in choice vocal bits for rhythmic effect. Cynyc takes one of the Plan's most openly poppy songs, "Following Through", and lays the vocals over a pumping breakbeat, shifting the vocals rhythmically so that the emphasis falls on different beats, completely recontextualizing the old melody.
Grandmaster Incongruous, meanwhile, executes a pretty brilliant mashup of "Pay for the Piano" and Elvis Costello's "Pump It Up", playing with tension by altering the intensity of his breakbeat and also wiring in samples of horn hits and synthesized basslines from songs I couldn't quite place. "Superpowers" gets the mashup treatment as well, from Erik Gundel, who layers Morrison's voice and the song's quivering synth over the acoustic guitar from "Ooh La La" by The Faces (best known as the song that closes out Rushmore). It's an oddly affecting juxtaposition, and a fitting wrap-up. But the best track on this whole deal has to be Quruli and Noise McCartney's tribal/aquatic take on "A Life of Possibilities", a hypnotic, beautiful drift that leaves the song's verses intact, but casts it in a whole new light.
There are, of course, as many misfires among the songs that finally made the cut-- most notably Cex's spastic IDM take on "Academy Award" (though he deserves credit for most interesting song choice). Virtually every other artist here takes a crack at something from either Emergency & I or Change, and while there's plenty that's ripe for the picking on those two albums, it would have been fun to hear more interpretations of earlier material-- The Dismemberment Plan is Terrified! is such a wildly unique and rambunctious album it's almost inconceivable that more people wouldn't have tried their hand at building something new out of it.
Despite its flaws, A People's History of The Dismemberment Plan remains an interesting listen, borne of a great concept. People who weren't interested in the Plan in the first place pretty obviously won't find much to love here, but it's safe to say that fans will probably be divided into two camps: those who'll think every last one of these remixes violates the corpse of one of their favorite bands, and those who'll find enough of interest in these reevaluations of the band's catalog to give it a few listens before filing it forever away on the record shelf.
