The Dillinger Escape Plan’s blend of extreme harshness and technicality had a seismic impact on the metal and hardcore underground with the release of their 1999 full-length debut Calculating Infinity. Not unlike those ’90s-era hidden-image 3D posters, the New Jersey quintet’s transfiguration of progressive metal influences like Meshuggah, Carcass, Human Remains, and Deadguy required a cognitive shift to recognize the detail and structural complexity under all the noise. From that point on, DEP have shown a hunger for pushing boundaries while attempting to stay true to their essence.
Every post-Calculating Dillinger Escape Plan album has contained head-scratching deviations from the original sound, something founding guitarist Ben Weinman and the original lineup once defined so clearly. By their last two albums, Option Paralysis and One of Us Is the Killer, the band had settled into marrying their signature mathcore style with high concentrations of melody and mid-tempo groove. As capably as they had found a middle ground, those albums pointed to a holding pattern. Dissociation, the band’s sixth and final album, touches often on the now-familiar template of pounding, grindcore-level noise flurries that once shook the world. Of course, Dillinger Escape Plan take sharp turns away from that template as well—often in the same song.
Dissociation hits its stride when the band grafts new elements onto its classic sound—something that, for all their chops, hasn’t been easy to pull off in the past. In one four-song stretch, Dillinger Escape Plan stride across a variety of styles as confidently as the one they invented. “Fugue,” the first of those four tracks, tastefully emulates Squarepusher’s hyper-busy brand of synthetic future jazz before opening up into a vista of delicate, gloomy ambiance. “Fugue” makes you wish that Dillinger Escape Plan did a few more Aphex Twin covers or collaborate on a split with Squarepusher. It’s the first of several reminders that they are leaving some untapped potential on the table as they close out their career.
On “Low Feels Blvd,” DEP’s familiar spazz-out crunch morphs into a grand jazz fusion section that you’d otherwise mistake for a Pat Metheny or John McLaughlin record. Not since Candiria’s heyday have extreme metal and jazz sounded like they belong together—a huge achievement for a band that built its reputation on sheer angularity. The song also stands out for how much vocalist Greg Puciato sounds genuinely unhinged. When Puciatio replaced original frontman Dimitri Minakakis in time for 2004’s sophomore full-length Miss Machine, he immediately increased the band’s threshold for melody, but he had to wait until after the Mike Patton collaboration EP Irony Is a Dead Scene to show the world his range. Unfairly or not, Puciato will continue to draw comparisons to Patton, especially on songs like “Surrogate,” where Dillinger scrapes close to Mr. Bungle/Faith No More’s bastardizations of Broadway-esque schmaltz.
Nevertheless, “Surrogate” demonstrates how, somewhere along the way, Dillinger learned how to stop stacking changes in its songs just for effect. As “Surrogate” rolls from one style to the next—grindcore, a crashing downtempo section, film noir—the mood shifts convincingly as well. Where Dillinger once tossed styles around as if changing costumes, now they actually get into character. In flashes, the band still comes up with fresh sounds. “Honeysuckle,” for example, adopts a Latin-flavored grind as though Latin music had originated from some extra-terrestrial psychology.
One of the things that made early DEP music so compelling was the way it conveyed the horrific malaise lurking behind the generic monoculture of the band’s native New Jersey suburbs—a sound so ugly grown out of a soulless environment. Now, the Dillinger Escape Plan aren’t anchored in a time or place, but that isn’t something the band has any control over. It’s a blessing and a curse that they will be forever synonymous with a particular period in hardcore and metal history. In subtle ways, Dissociation reminds us that the band hung in there long after the world could have passed it by.
