The Dillinger Escape Plan
Miss Machine
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A lot of River Styx water has gone under extreme metal's bridge to Hell in the five years since the Dillinger Escape Plan released its intricately raging classic Calculating Infinity. The band floored first-person-shooter types by taking math rock's jazzy riffology and dime-stopping time changes (somebody owes the Dazzling Killmen a gift basket) and stapling them to the hardcore they grew up on. Outsider metal had a boom just like everything else in the '90s, but Infinity still felt like a dizzying peak, a safe space to thrash for kids too smart to feel welcome in mook-world and too young to buy beer.
These days, it seems like metalcore has become just another subsidiary of Emo, Inc.-prog hobbits like Coheed and Cambria and flailers like the Blood Brothers have opened for Dashboard Confessional, for Satan's sake! But the Plan have always been a few steps ahead of their black-T-shirted brethren. Guitarists Ben Weinman and Brian Benoit are too in love with strange riffs and stranger rhythmic shifts, and the way those bizarro dynamics force you to pay attention to the human voice at the center of the chaos.
On Miss Machine, their first full-length recording with new vocalist Greg Puciato (Mike Patton filled in for 2002's Irony Is a Dead Scene EP), the band's bulldozer actually uncovers a few melodies. Openers "Panasonic Youth" and "Sunshine the Werewolf" are standard DEP-screamy and frantic. But"Phone Home" is new territory, a techno-industrial slow burner that finds Puciato wrapping his nine-inch nails around the mike, mumbling about taking "fire out of heaven's clenched fist." The surging "Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants" kicks off with a riff you actually could hum, then explodes into a chorus tailor-made for the "slam section" of a skate video. "Unretrofied" even smells like MTV2: keyboards, harmonies, and a big catchy chorus about robots faking it so real it's beyond fake. Gleefully impurist and highly addictive, it's the sound of a proudly "out" band finding its way in.
Grade: B+
