There are some combinations in life that shouldn't work...but for one reason or another they wind up working like a charm: peanut butter and bananas, mashed potatos and peaches..Siegfried and Roy. To this list, add emo and lo-fi grooviness.

With Emergency & I, Washington D.C.'s Dismemberment Plan have successfully merged these two seemingly incompatible genres. It's an album filled with contradiction, where noisy guitar blasts sit side by side with belching electonic bleeps and scratchy ambient drones. Lead singer Travis Morrison's vocals alternate effortlessly between emotive howl and frenetic beat-poetry. Opener "A Life of Possibilities" begins with a squelchy mid-tempo groove and eventually mutates into a buzzing, chiming guitar assault. Its tone is indicative of the remainder of the album: songs that start out as one thing, but finish as something else entirely. Punky guitar and a malfunctioning keyboard combine to create the chatoic tone of "What Do You Want Me to Say?" while pulsing casio beats and a plantive whisper lull you into "You Are Invited" just before a monstrous wall of guitars and roaring vocals comes in and smashes your head in. Soul Coughing-meets-The Get Up Kids is a good way to describe the sound here. Produced by J. Robbins (Jawbox/Burning Airlines), Emergency & I applies plenty of studio trickery without ever losing sight of the band's raw power. The Dismemberment Plan's eclectic emo-pop leaves you yearning for more -- and you can't really say that about Siegfried and Roy, can you?