The Dismemberment Plan ruined my life. In the fall of 2001, I was a high school senior with a jazz guitar scholarship and a plan to give up my rock ‘n’ roll dream on my first day of college. But one glorious/tragic afternoon, somebody advised me to nab “Gyroscope” off of Napster. Twenty minutes of 56k dial-up downloading later, the earth stopped rotating. For the next few months, I would strum through the big-band charts and jazz combo arrangements of “All the Things You Are” and “Autumn Leaves”, but I was merely going through the motions. All I could think about were those two minutes and 29 seconds of dysfunctional bliss that had branded itself into my skull as if it were written exclusively for me, and how I couldn’t wait to go home so I could listen to it again and again. Three-and-a-half years later, I dropped out of college to tour in a band.

When I bought Emergency & I, I felt like I had received an artifact from a future generation; the Dismemberment Plan were like Wyld Stallyns in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and I finally understood why people preached that rock ‘n’ roll could change the world. Their next album was to be called Change. Change is a terrifying name for a record by your favorite band. People fear change, resist change, lose change between the cushions of their couches.

But “change” is exactly what the Dismemberment Plan had to do in 2001. In many ways, the band’s 1999 masterpiece Emergency & I was a tightened version of their previous effort, The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified, which was an exponential but predictable growth from the band’s rambunctious 1995 debut, !. All three were collections of damaged pop songs delivered in a straightforward manner with very little underlying connective tissue, and their cohesion lay simply in the fact that these songs were made by this band at this particular time.

The band had made fans with Emergency & I by striking a delicate balance between hooks and noise, so one faulty step in either direction was certain to disappoint somebody. The almost cocky album title Change is one of the few instances in which one could accuse the Dismemberment Plan of pretension. In conjunction with its white clouds/blue sky cover art, it presents itself as a dare, often raising eyebrows before the music encoded within collided with eardrums. Some listeners never got past the first chord of album opener “Sentimental Man”, wherein dramatic guitar chords and an airy synth pad sail over a limber mid-tempo bounce. When Travis Morrison’s voice makes its entrance 32 seconds into the track, the Dismemberment Plan most likely alienated those drawn to the group for their skronk. Fans of Guy Picciotto’s elastic rasps don’t want to listen to a singer whose falsetto can, unfortunately/accurately, be compared to Dave Matthews.

Washington, DC punk bands have a bad habit of over-dramatizing their actions. The “Revolution Summer” of 1985, which included such bands as Rites of Spring and Embrace, was just a fancy name for a bunch of dudes saying, “Hey guys, let’s start a band.” The truth is, Change isn’t as much of a 360 as it prophesizes. Its aforementioned first track easily recalls the two tracks that bookend Emergency & I: The song starts in the same shamelessly abrupt manor as “A Life of Possibilities”, and the way bassist Eric Axelson shakes hands with drummer Joe Easley picks up where “Back and Forth” dropped off. Conceptually, the quiet/loud pop song “Time Bomb” doesn’t stray far from “What Do You Want Me to Say?”, and songs like “Superpowers” and “Sentimental Man” are deeply rooted in the float-funk of Emergency’s standout “The City.”

Throughout Change, guitarist Jason Caddell trades his Marshall-amplified guitar for woozy keyboard textures, handing the strumming duties over to Morrison’s chiming Gibson. The lack of Caddell’s crunch is part of what many interpreted as the group “softening up,” but is actually more representative of the band members letting the songs dictate their roles, rather than adapting the arrangements to their strengths. This results in songs that are less schizophrenic, staying within one mood and creating interest by way of dynamics and harmonic movements. In fact, the band almost seems self-aware that they might be chilling out too hard, and their more rocking numbers—“Pay for the Piano” and “Secret Curse”—have a feeling of overcompensation. Likewise, “Automatic” seems to only exist in order to have an acoustic track on the record.

Historically, the most significant aspect of Change lies in Morrison’s lyrics and delivery: It stands as the bridge between his greatest triumph and Travistan, his first solo album and most devastating failure. Travistan was stuffed with verbal clunkers from Moses “growing [his] beard to his nuts” to a direct quote of “all I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” The seeds of cringe-worthy lyrics were sewn sparingly throughout Change with lines like “It could have been off the hook, now” and “I’m an Old Testament type of guy / I like my coffee black and my parole denied,” and, hell, almost every word of “Ellen and Ben.” Most of Morrison’s flops are oversteps of his wit, presented as if he wants his band to be your guilty pleasure.

Vocally, the endearing little shit that screamed “I’m fine, Mom, how’s Washington?” on The Dismemberment Plan Is Terrified is completely absent. Travis relies heavily on the mellow end of his tenor, and throughout most of the album, his smooth delivery excels—nobody can sing the word “yeah” with as much charisma. However, he occasionally overshoots his high notes, making them pop out of the mix unfavorably and highlighting the album’s sometimes unsatisfying production. But comparing Change to Emergency & I sonically is unfair; Emergency was originally intended to be released on Interscope Records and was created with a major label budget.

All bitching/moaning aside, Change is filled with fantastic, transcendent moments in which the arrangements, lyrics, vocals, and production coalesce perfectly. The mysterious string sample that arpeggiates in “The Face of the Earth” sets up the perfect mood for a story of a lover spontaneously vanishing into thin air. After the woman is “blown from the face of the earth,” Morrison’s confusion is heightened by spiky guitar chords that settle into consonance as the protagonist accepts his circumstance. In “Following Through”, a descending progression of jangling guitar chords echoes the downfall of a hopelessly arrogant character. Arguably, the most effective relationship between vocals and chords exists in “Time Bomb”, its charmingly immature vocals are complemented by an elementary chord progression that moves upwards as each extended metaphor becomes more dramatic.

To truly love something, one must be aware of its flaws and not ignore them but accept them. And I know that Change has a few dad-humor lyrics, a couple of filler tracks, and the occasional too-loud guitar chord. But I completely fucking love Change. So I apologize: To Change for treating it like the older sibling that lives in its younger brother’s shadow, to DeSoto Records for potentially losing catalog sales by burning the Dismemberment Plan’s entire discography for everybody I knew in high school, to the guy who was unlucky enough to stand in front of me at the Creepy Crawl when I screamed, “I’ll be damned if I feel like I will ever know anything” in his ear when the Plan played “The Other Side” at their final show in St. Louis, to my parents for dropping out of college. But these are the sort of apologies that exist only for those that need to hear them. I don’t feel sorry for loving a band so deeply. They taught me how to rock again and may have taught me how to love in the first place. The Dismemberment Plan saved my life.

Listen: “Time Bomb” [at youtube.com]