¤ jetless heights

+ Wed, February 16

4. The Dismemberment Plan – The Ice Of Boston

For years, I’ve been cursed with falling into a band just as they break up.  The Smashing Pumpkins concert of 1999 comes to mind.  HUM, The Promise Ring, Elliot Smith.  Pavement?  Yeah, never saw them either.

Somehow though, miracle of miracles, I caught The Dismemberment Plan on their farewell tour.  What’s really amazing is how fantastically that entire show went.  Good venue, good friends, good audience, front row, a set full of song requests.  I mean, when you get to request one of your favorite songs and the bassist comes down to high five you for the choice, well, something absurd would have to happen to make that show less than stupidly wicked.

In any event, at the time I was only familiar with Emergency & I and Change.  While those are definitely the two albums to own, it didn’t help me understand why everyone cheered when someone requested The Ice Of Boston.

Now, the song was nice and all and dancing on stage and sticking one of my red DPlan stickers on a stage pillar (the front left one at the Magic Stick) was totally rad and all, but that was only one listen.  I picked up Is Terrified sometime shortly thereafter and, well… I still can’t get into it very much.  Just a little too schizophrenic, a little too constantly dynamic.

Anyway.  To the actual story!  Later that summer I ended up on a two week vacation in Boston (thus missing the one and only HUM reunion show since 2000) and sure enough, I made it a point to listen to The Ice Of Boston.

We stayed at the beautiful (and highly, highly recommended) Charles Hotel for the nights in Boston itself and it was a very nice time of year there.  Hot during the days certainly, but at night it was cool and the air was scented perfectly of summertime.  Given that this was directly downtown in a very urban area and very close to the waterfront, that says a lot for the quality of the air.  I went for a walk one night, scoping out the area around Harvard, watching the street performers do their things (and they were surprisingly excellent, honestly) with this song playing on the iPod among others.  Walking back, I stopped in the hotel’s beautiful outdoor courtyard to plough through Bill Bryson’s A Short History Of Nearly Everything and enjoy the weather.

Something about that cool Atlantic air, the calmness of that song (for that band at least) and the familiar tone Bryson always writes in—it was all very pleasant and very calming.  If only I could’ve figured out the locations that weirdo Travis Morrison had been writing from.  Next time, I guess.

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1 → Shane  –  (Feb 17 2005, 10:19 PM)

The ice of Boston really is muddy. It’ll snow like hell, freeze, get dirty, and stay that way for months. It kinda makes one depressed in the way described in the song.






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