The Dillinger Escape Plan

It’s pretty tough to know where to start. I’m muddled – if this represents the last time The Dillinger Escape Plan will play London, as suggested in a recent issue of Rock Sound magazine (albeit before these dates were rescheduled from late 2007), then the New Jersey pioneers certainly blast out on a considerable high. But there’s little feeling of finality to proceedings, and although the all-too-brief set ends in a semi-planned, semi-spontaneous chaos, no goodbyes were said with an end in mind. So, what to make of it all?

“This feels like never ending,” is a good enough reassurance for me, for the time being, ‘Milk Lizard’ one of a sizeable handful of cuts from the band’s latest long-player, the rightly acclaimed Ire Works (review). A collection of songs that still gets better with each listen a good three months after its release, Ire Works should propel the band into new levels of appreciation this year, beyond the know-all hardcore and old-school acolytes who’ve followed them since the blistering precision bombast of 1999’s Calculating Infinity, a debut so unprecedented that it took its makers – well, some of them – five years to follow up. As long as they are sticking together, that is – their tour itinerary suggests as much, rolling right up into May and a date with a Tokyo audience likely to be as stunned into blubbering post-event adulation as I was.

- - -

- - -

Almost, anyway, as there are times at the Astoria 2 where Dillinger’s set sags – not because of any failure to keep the tempo high and the room electric, but simply because they open and close in such devastatingly impressive fashion that the 20-or-so minutes between Fucking hell look at that! moments one to seven and Seriously, this is fucking incredible! instances fourteen to finish can’t help but seem tame by comparison. The opening onslaught finds vocalist Greg Puciato in the crowd, swiftly followed by guitarist Ben Weinman; minutes later Puciato is climbing the lighting trestle, leading to a note passed up to the stage from behind the scenes to the tune of “Do that again and we will pull the power”. “What the fuck, man?” is Puciato’s response. “I thought this was London, home of punk rock, home of The Clash and the Sex Pistols?” True, but they’re long gone, buried beneath progression unrelenting, most of it emanating from this very ensemble for the past decade or so.

‘Panasonic Youth’ gets the capacity crowd sticky from the word go, its dizzying guitar work – a characteristic running the catalogue, of course – matched finger tap for finger tap by lights that threaten to black-out Oxford Street above us. When they’re up full bore, having a dozen open palms before your peepers can’t block out the glare; when they sizzle blue, green, red, vaguely in time to music no man can truly synchronise any visual accompaniment to ‘less they’re possessed by abilities beyond the Devil’s own deviance, the effect on the senses is akin to jacking one’s protruding organ directly into the mains: stimulating, to say the very least.

- - -

- - -

Dicks firmly in trousers, the going-berserk front pit continues its tumultuous bop to further highlights from Dillinger albums two and three, and beyond: ‘Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants’, ‘When Good Dogs Do Bad Things’ (with crowd member intro of “I’ve the best you’ll ever HAVE”), ‘Fix Your Face’, ‘Sunshine The Werewolf’, more. But it’s the band’s confidence in delivering their greatest pre-Puciato number so early on that leaves this reviewer in no doubt that the new and the next are firmly on the agenda nowadays. ‘43% Burnt’ is, as always, brutal. But tossed into the mix as the third (or fourth – too busy smiling to care) song? Take that, decaying old guard.

So progression, it seems, is still very much in evidence: rumours come and go, and more often than not spiral right around once more, but come the end of an hour’s frenzy of brilliant breakdown after more-brilliant breakdown, plus absurd antics straight out of the Madman’s Guide To Stagemanship, it’s tough to imagine The Dillinger Escape Plan calling quits on one of the most turbulent of modern rock’s rollercoasters. Members have come and gone, via fair means or foul (and just unfortunate), but still they rocket onwards; admirers past have raised middle fingers at the incorporation of pop sensibilities, but fuck the haters, seriously, as this, in the flesh, is entirely as good as it gets.

As good as it gets, and muddled of mind or not, I’m not ready to step off any time soon.

Photographs: Spiros Stergiou