It’s never a nice thing when a band you like decide to break
up, but when The Dillinger Escape Plan’s guitarist and founder Ben Weinman
announced that 2016’s Dissociation album
would be their swansong, it made a strange kind of sense. There were no petty spats, no ‘musical
differences’ (read: petty spats) and no embarrassingly public fallouts; they’ve
just decided that enough is enough.
Weinman’s reasons made sense: not wanting to keep doing it when people
were over it; not wanting to descend into self-parody; not wanting to try to
push a pretty extreme band for longer than age would allow. They wanted to leave dead horses unflogged and I
respected that, even though I didn’t really like it.
Cruelly avoiding Newcastle on their farewell tour, we piled
into a car and headed to Nottingham’s fine Rock City venue to see them
off. Hard to pigeonhole, Dillinger have
had several labels thrown at them and have done their best to avoid them all:
math-core, math-metal, metal-core, and whatever other hybrid terms lazy hacks could
muster. At times nodding to the likes of
Nine Inch Nails or Faith No More as much as their whatever-core predecessors
Botch and Coalesce, Dillinger simply sound like Dillinger.
I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Rock City, while not
filled to capacity, is respectably busy for a band that isn’t exactly easy on
the ears. Apparently preferring Jack
Daniels to support bands, we managed to miss one and a half of the supports and
arrive midway through Ho99o9’s (pronounced ‘Horror’, apparently) set. A live drummer and no other instruments that
I could see, they were basically two guys stomping around the stage and shouting. Wikipedia lists them as ‘experimental hip hop’
and when was Wikipedia ever been wrong?
The dense, mostly-bass noise that accompanies the vocals was pretty
cool, it’s just a shame that they didn’t bring anyone with them to play it live,
and it did get a little repetitive after a while. Call me old fashioned, but that’s just
cheating.
Dillinger, fronted by the impossibly ripped Greg Puciato,
walk on to minimal lightshow or fuss and kick into recent single ‘Limerent
Death’. The rolling riff gives way to
some NIN-like quiet moments before the accelerating tempo of the ending and
some frankly savage screams from Puciato.
‘Panasonic Youth’ is next, showcasing the breakneck tempo changes and baffling
time signatures that make them such a unique prospect.
Puciato has developed into a fine frontman (hard going,
since he technically replaced Mike Patton in the band) with a versatile range, which
he shows off effortlessly tonight (how many of these [blank]-core bands have
the drummer do the clean vocals because the singer can’t?). Capable of a controlled falsetto, a fierce
scream, and a distinctive clean vocal, he’s a ball of energy on stage. In fact, it’s exhausting just watching them,
such is the intensity of the show.
Weinman is a hyperactive presence (probably reflected in his writing
style), seemingly unable to play a full song without mounting an amplifier or
launching himself across the stage. Not
missing a single note while doing it, by the way.
The set draws from their 20-year career, with 5 songs pulled
from Dissociation, and a good
selection from the rest. ‘Milk Lizard’ brings
a dirty groove, ‘Black Bubblegum’ and ‘When I Lost My Bet’ are all stop-start
rhythms and weird tempos, and the dynamic ‘One Of Us Is The Killer’ is the
closest thing they’ll do to a conventional song. Of their signature skittering ‘math’ songs, ‘Sunshine
The Werewolf’ and ‘Farewell, Mona Lisa’ stand out as excellent songs as well as
absolute monsters.
They slow it down with the piano-led ‘Mouths Of Ghosts’
before destroying the place with a final rendition of older tune ‘43% Burnt’.
It’s impressive enough that they can even remember such complex, fast and technical
songs, but to be so tight and together live shows just what and exceptional band
we’re losing. They’re incredible tonight
and as the crowd streams out I don’t think any of us will really appreciate how
special they were until later. Sure, we
still have bands like Norma Jean, Car Bomb, Heck, Candiria and (presumably)
Converge but good as they are none of them quite have what Dillinger had.
And here’s me already referring to them in the past
tense. Shit.
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