Travis Morrison (far right): 'There's a fine line between confusing and titillating people.'

With each album it releases, the indie rock Dismemberment Plan finds itself facing a slew of new labels. And while the name sounds metal, that's one of the few tags that hasn't been hung on the Washington D.C.-based band.

"If someone is talking to me and knows my band, they're probably going to know what we do," said frontman Travis Morrison. "But if they don't, usually I'll just name two bands, whatever comes to mind, just to get out of the conversation."

It's a trick he learned from a producer at Interscope Records, where the band had a short-lived relationship that began just before the Great Label Dump of 1999. The producer told him, "Whenever you go [talk] to label people, just throw out the name of whatever band is popular that day. It doesn't even matter if that's what you sound like or not."

And Morrison has found the response is great.

"When people ask me [who we sound like], I just go mentally blank, so I say the first thing that comes into my head. A lot of times I say Prince and Fugazi."

He once told a pair of Interscope interns that his band sounded like "Radiohead meets the Beastie Boys" and had the two all but bowing at his feet.

If the band read -- and believed -- its own press, members themselves might be puzzled as to what they sound like. Depending on who you read and when it was written, you might think The Dismemberment Plan sounds like Radiohead, Shudder to Think, REM, Steely Dan, Talking Heads, Jawbox, The Presidents of the United States, or James Brown by way of Beck.

Part of that comes from The Dismemberment Plan's refusal to record the same album twice, something that keeps critics scrambling for new pigeonholes in which to shove them.

"The people who listen to us are the kind of people who like having surprises come out of their speakers," offered Morrison, who founded the band in 1993. "There's a fine line between confusing and titillating people, but most of them seem to be game. Even after our first album came out, people went, 'What is this?,' but we've had a lot of people stay with us.

"We definitely have some people along for the ride."

Enough people, in fact, that the Plan's last album, Emergency & I, sold 30,000 copies, and the band's latest effort, Change, has earned just-short-of-glowing reviews in Entertainment Weekly, New Musical Express, and Pulse. They also landed a feature in the pages of the December issue of Spin magazine. Even with that much ink, nobody seems certain what their music is.

"When we started out, people said we sounded like They Might Be Giants. Then they said we were Soul Coughing. Next, we were emo. Now we're Dave Matthews," Morrison pointed out with a laugh.

"I think it's incumbent upon the artist to try doing new things, like Beck, who keeps making good music but never the same way. It's on the artist to keep it interesting and dynamic."

The Dismemberment Plan has done just that, specifically by being adventurous enough to remain indie and underground even as their popularity begins to swell. Refusing to jump on any single bandwagon or join a scene is part of Morrison's plan to find longevity.

"You'll definitely die if you're connected to a particular scene," he said. "It's OK to be validated by a collective idea, but in the end you have to have a lonely, singular, spiritual relationship with the music that you can access.

"In the end, you have to follow your own compass."

Following its own compass has taken The Dismemberment Plan on some rather notable adventures, not the least of which was being hand-picked by Pearl Jam to open for its Y2K European tour and booking multiple Japanese tours in its datebook. The band recently returned to the U.S. after nearly two weeks in Japan, and is settling back into the groove of playing for Americans.

"Actually, it's kind of intimidating to play for American crowds after being in Japan," Morrison acknowledged. "The Japanese come out to see the band. They stand there and watch the show. If you're an American band, you're used to driving across the country to play for assholes, so it's kind of disconcerting to go there and have this whole crowd staring at you the whole time.

"It's charming to come back and see people talking and ordering beers and trying to pick each other up while you're playing."

Even if crowds are talking during the shows, it's obvious that a lot more people are listening to The Dismemberment Plan these days. The new album, more than the previous three, shows some jazz and soul influences, but it also stays connected to the core sound of post-punk funk. Even if critics can't hear it, Morrison stays tuned to a common thread that weaves through his music, a thread that he finds also connects to a diverse tapestry of sounds.

"I hear the same energy from Robert Johnson as I do with NWA," he said. "If you study it enough, you see the same things being expressed over and over again in vastly different methods. We're all students of music, looking for new ways to say it. That makes for some pretty interesting combinations.

"Sometimes, it's a lot more interesting than it is good."

Having won over a large chunk of the 18-to-29-year-old demographic, the Plan recognizes it would do well with the 30-and-up crowd if it was willing to play different venues.

"I think older people would come out if we weren't playing in dirty, smoky clubs late at night," he said. "But I really like playing in dirty, smoky clubs late at night. In Chicago, we're now doing well enough to play larger slick theaters, and that's kind of cool. Maybe we'll do some more of that."

But don't look for them to team up with other acts on some multi-band radio station shed tour anytime soon.

"We've always been lone wolf-y about touring and music," he explained. "We're not good at the idea of, 'Let's tour together and make some money.' What we've been offered, artistically [in those situations] always kind of stuck in our throat. That's not what this is about. We only want to play with bands that we love."

Sounds like a Plan.