On Friday night, I went to see the Dismemberment Plan at Rams Head Live, which was nice since I missed that Metro Gallery show a few weeks earlier where, it turned out, they played new songs for the first time since reuniting. I wanted to wait to hear the new songs live at Rams Head, but when I found out I'd get to interview Travis Morrison before the show, I went ahead and treated myself to the YouTube spoilers from the Metro Gallery show. I saw the Plan over a dozen times back before they broke up, and those shows between Emergency & I and Change where they were consistently writing and previewing new songs from the latter were such a great period that really cemented them as one of my favorite live bands of all time. I enjoyed the 2011 reunion show I saw, and they played as well as they ever have, but I missed that little extra charge that comes from seeing a band at the top of their game and still building their catalog.

As it happens, it's been almost exactly a decade since the last time the Plan were testing out new songs live -- the aborted 5th album that would've been if the band hadn't decide to break up and let Morrison use those songs for the ill-fated solo album Travistan. I still maintain that that album is better than its reputation, but I also know those songs wouldn't have gone down much better as a Dismemberment Plan album; the buzz at the shows they played them at didn't feel very enthusiastic either. And in a way, it's better for the band's legacy that those songs got written out of their history, the backlash contained in Morrison's solo career. The new songs are better than that, and should actually be a good way to pick the story back up.

The ode to Northern Virginia "White Collar White Trash" is probably my favorite of the new songs, partly because it brings back the spastic synth punk aspect of the band's sound that had been downplayed toward the end of their original run. It was especially welcome in Friday's set, which confirmed my suspicion that new songs would mean that the first two Plan albums will make up an even smaller sliver of setlists than they had for a while, the ever-present "The Ice Of Boston" and "OK, Joke's Over," and little else.
I got to the show a little late, at which point they were playing "The Other Side" (which, as I mentioned in the interview piece, was influenced by Lake Trout, whose guitarist Ed Harris was in the audience at the show). I don't know how much of the show I missed, but it wasn't much, since I saw a good 90 minutes of show -- I'm assuming they opened with "What Do You Want Me To Say?" since they never do a show without that one.

I'd offered my +1 on the guest list to a few friends, including a couple that I'd used to go see the band with all the time back in the day, but none of them could come, at least one of which because of the Orioles playoff game going on that night. Still, I ran into another friend at the show who I didn't even know was a big Dismemberment Plan, who'd come with a friend of his who he'd recently bonded with over the discovery that they were both into the band, so that was fun. Before the show, I worked an event across town, at which one of the speakers was a local newscaster who'd call the newsroom during breaks, to get the score to tell the crowd. Then I got to the Plan show, and the band would ask the audience for the score between songs. One of the single biggest eruptions of applause during the whole show came from the bar, when the O's officially won the game during "OK, Joke's Over." I'm reasonably sure the show would've sold a good number of additional tickets had that game not been on that night. I would say they coulda picked a better night to play Baltimore, but it is kind of fun to be out on the town when a city is that charged up, even if it's about something going on somewhere else at the moment.

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