bondagewound's Full Review: Calculating Infinity by The Dillinger Escape Plan
I really like extreme metal. I thrill to Origin's hyper speed drumming and Cannibal Corpse's brutality. I love Meshuggah's wall of aggression and Fear Factory's precision assault of mechanical mania. The Dillinger Escape Plan is nothing like any of these bands. They are unhinged, really crazy, disturbed, likely to tear your throat out while giving you a hicky and then bury you in their front lawn with your legs sticking out of the ground. The playing on this record is tightly regimented and organized. But it sounds so frenzied and random it could be immediately dismissed as sloppy and lacking any attention to details. This is metal made by players who listen to Tal Farlow and Minor Threat. There are no down-tuned guitars or scooped mids. The riffs are born of insanity and change effortlessly and so quickly. Think of a group of Berklee graduates playing Black Flag. There are endless comparisons that could be made, but it is worthless to try. I'm listening to the record right now for the fifth time and it surprised me.
Guitarist Ben Weinman and drummer Chris Pennie in particular ooze the slick and delicate cool of jazz players. They can be so soft with their instruments and then bash away into oblivion. Check out also the matched tapping phrases and the madcap shredding by Ben and second guitarist Brian Bennoit, those tight minor-seconds, the bass mimicry, it's so much to take in. "43% Burnt" and "The Running Board" begin with intense crunch and then erupt into delicate clean passages. And "Clip The Apex...Accept Instruction" speeds along so quickly, one might actually feel claustrophobic and angry. Vocalist Dimitri Minakakis can convey emotion and make it sound genuine, which makes me appreciate his lyrical content, which is mostly about the pain of a single year ("the hardest year of my life" he says in the liner notes). But we believe every word he says, has such an anguished voice. He doesn't bother to alter his voice to scream. There are no guttural growls and no vocal chord shredding exercises a la Slipknot here. He just shrieks with what may be the scariest voice in music. He gives serious competition to Nick Oliveri.
Dillinger also excels at bludgeoning you senseless and then shocking you with a powerful crescendo. Check out how "Calculating Infinity" starts with lovely atmospherics, explodes into train-crash riffage, and then becomes "4th Grade Dropout." The latter, which saws away at your cranium, becomes quite chaotic, and then drops a bomb in a ferocious breakdown.
"Weekend Sex Change," is quite refreshing and shows just how versatile this band is. The song is a lovely acid-jazz number with drums reminiscent of John Scolfield's "Uberjam." The modulating guitar tones and shimmering chords never shutter and the mid point sampling is as scary as Dennis Hopper in "Blue Velvet." The album's last song with the Zappa-esque title ("Variations On A Cocktail Dress") cuts out abruptly just past the two minute mark and leaves a wide space to reveal one of the handful of "hidden songs" that I have ever enjoyed (the others are found at the end of NIN and Manson albums). A hidden song is a very tacky thing to do and rarely works. This one does because it is so far away from the music on the rest of the album. A sonic collage piece that one doesn't normally think a band like this capable of. It's deeply disturbing with samples of a girl talking to her father about what sounds like a rape, complete with melodramatic string swellings. I'm forced to wonder whether this is one of Minakakis' primal revenge fantasies. Many of the songs focus around his longings for women, his feelings of rejection and spite. It's rare that an artist opens their self up in this way, angry and vicious, and still be believable. You have to be one Hell of an actor or a seriously hurting individual to do it. Dillinger Escape Plan is a group of guys who are each both of these things, and they have it under control.
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