It’s the last night of The Dillinger Escape Plan’s UK tour, so you might expect them to be a bit worn out. Perhaps they are – but if that’s the case, they’re certainly not showing it.
Stolen Babies
Opening support act Stolen Babies don’t seem to be at their best, but being unfamiliar with their material I can’t be certain. There seems to be too much bottom end, a common problem with rock bands that are heavy on the keyboards, and the muddy bass end makes it hard to hear what’s happening on top.
Which is a shame – Stolen Babies have an acid-nightmare-at-the-circus image and a frontwoman who sings and plays the accordion, and they certainly looked interesting. The music in their strangely short set just didn’t catch my imagination, though, and the rest of the room didn’t seem best impressed either.
Between The Buried And Me
Standing in sharp contrast is the almost indescribable work of Between The Buried And Me, whose music is immediately arresting. Basing their material on a bedrock of super-technical grind metal, they make a powerful and intense racket.
But by peppering the extreme guitar-and-screaming style with interludes that meander into territories as different as classical, jazz and country (seriously), Between The Buried And Me demand your attention, overcoming the customary inertia of sprawling ten-minute songs with astonishing musicianship and wilful weirdness. I’m not sure if I liked them, as such, but they were well worth hearing.
The Dillinger Escape Plan
This tour must have been a double-edged sword for Between The Buried And Me and Stolen Babies; the kudos and exposure of touring with The Dillinger Escape Plan must be balanced against the inevitable overshadowing that they produce at the top of the bill. The Dillinger Escape Plan’s reputation precedes them and, end of tour or otherwise, they deliver on that promise.
They take the stage in front of a backdrop projection of what seems to be an old silent movie about hypnotism, and with little ceremony beyond the enthusiastic howling of the crowd they detonate on stage. It’s a reviewer’s cliché to describe a band as “exploding into action”, but there’s no other way to put it – exploding is precisely what The Dillinger Escape Plan do.
The furious intensity of the music is matched by the motion of the band members. As if actual live performance of music as intricate and fast as this wasn’t enough to defy belief, watching the band throw themselves around the stage like speed-crazed madmen in a rubber room is a staggering sight.
How do they make that noise? How can they throw those shapes? The repeated barrages of smoke and pure white lighting add to the effect, producing stark highlights and black-paper silhouettes; it looks like a missing scene from Apocalypse Now up there.
It’s an appropriate image; The Dillinger Escape Plan look and sound like a band at war with the world around them. Founder member Ben Weinman runs and jumps around the stage like a human pinball, wrestling with his guitar – is the instrument attacking the man, or the man attacking the instrument? It looks like a close fight so far. Jeff Tuttle and Liam Wilson seem slightly more in control of their own weapons of choice, but not by much.
Out in front is Greg Puciato, whose muscular build and ferocious vocal range make him as daunting a presence as he is a captivating one. If this show is a Vietnam flashback, then Puciato is the glory-crazed sergeant who leads the troops out under a hail of enemy fire, howling defiance as he approaches close enough to see the whites of their eyes.
Puciato’s squad unleash sprays of machine-gun percussion and trilling streams of precision guitar notes behind his bellowed commands; every song is like the musical equivalent of a DMT trip, a hundred-second blast that packs in more experience than weeks of normal life.
It’s transformational stuff - even more so than on record - because you can watch these demons being summoned up in front of you. It’s incredible, and a little exhausting for the audience – so every tune must be an endurance test for the band.
The Dillinger Escape Plan know their punters and work hard to keep everyone happy. They play a set that draws on the full range of their back catalogue, from a couple of frenetic numbers like “Sugar Coated Sour” And “43% Burnt” from Calculating Infinity, right the way up to the pop-tinged and hook-laden lunacy of “Party Smasher” from current album Ire Works.
For someone seeing them live for the first time, it feels a little like being beaten up; repeated short sharp blows that you start growing accustomed to even as each one rocks you back on your heels. I don’t remember ever enjoying being beaten up quite this much, though.
Suddenly, it’s all over; a no-encore cease-fire has been called, and the winner of the war is still undecided. I get the feeling that’s the whole point; given their turbulent history of mishaps and stubborn refusal to do anything other than what they want, The Dillinger Escape Plan strike me as a band who live for the joy of the fight itself, rather than for anyone else’s definition of victory.
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Posted in Live reviews |
Tags: Between The Buried And Me, Dillinger Escape Plan, extreme metal, mathcore, prog, Stolen Babies
