Think it was 2013 when I tried to listen to The Dismemberment Plan for the first time. I was on my Pitchfork tip during that time, trying to hear ‘new’ albums particularly in the indie scene. And Emergency & I, the band’s album released in 1999 is considered to be something of a classic in that genre. I went onto YouTube, searched for this track, listened to the first few seconds and really wasn’t into it. Why was this man singing like that? And what was with the squirty keyboard bass? Get that outta here. That was more or less my line of thinking from what I can recall. This was a major error.

Fast forward a few months later. I was in my first year of university and decided to really sit down and give the full album a listen. ‘A Life of Possibilities’, if you don’t know, starts Emergency off so there were the strange vocals and the keyboard bass again. But this time those two things sounded great together, and were backed with an undeniable groove too. This is what happens when you give a song more than a mere few seconds of your time. Then the dueling guitar hook came in and I was instantly hooked. If there is one thing about Emergency & I that I appreciated straight from the bat, it’s that almost every track has a great chorus. There’s no proper chorus in ‘Possibilities’ but those harmonizing guitars act as one, coming in between each verse in which singer and lyricist Travis Morrison goes on about – I think – someone who isolates themselves from society but finds that at some point they’ll have to get out there to truly live their life.

So yeah, do check out Emergency & I if you have the time. Don’t be like me when I was seventeen and disregard it because you don’t like a few sounds on it. The record is suitable for those going through their quarter life crisis, or just those who have hard times growing up in their 20s. That’s a large demographic.