When I was 13, the Venn Diagram of my musical tastes consisted of bands I knew my friends liked and popular bands that seemed “aggressive.”
Unfortunately, that made me a fan of Limp Bizkit.
But why am I bringing up Fred Durst and the Backwards Red Caps in a review of the new Dillinger Escape Plan album, you ask?
Well, the 13-year-old of my past crawled out from under the nu-metal rock, got past puberty and kissed a girl. He also started to listen to music with artistic merit and realized if he wanted music with aggression, there were bigger and more frightening fish in the sea – like Dillinger Escape Plan.
While Limp Bizkit merely requested the breaking of “stuff” in their popular song “Break Stuff,” Dillinger Escape Plan requests nothing. They take and they break everything.
I could continue comparing the bands, noting Dillinger Escape Plan, on their 2004 album, “Miss Machine,” screamed about “Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants” while Limp Bizkit set fire to failed attempts at reviving former free-love festivals.
But this repeated mention of Limp Bizkit’s name is making my throat close and my soul sad. Therefore, I will move on.
Dillinger Escape Plan also started out in the late 1990s, releasing their “Under the Running Board” EP and their full-length hearing destroyer, “Calculating Infinity,” thereby ringing in the end of the last millennium as if existence was going down with it.
“Miss Machine” featured a new singer, Greg Puciato, and songs that could be described as “slow” and “melodic” and “actual singing.” However, this mixture of their former chaos and a newly acquired appreciation for pretty things resulted in an amazing contrast, accentuating their loud parts and making them seem even louder and crazier.
But their new album, “Ire Works,” experiments too much and suffers as a result.
It starts with a one-two kick-in-the-face titled “Fix Your Face,” featuring former lead singer Dimitri Minakakis.
This is followed by “Lurch,” continuing the band’s trend of lyrics simultaneously sensitive and creepy with such phrases as “you wear your skin so fresh.”
“Black Bubblegum” wears its Mike Patton influences on its sleeve. If this were as slow as the “Works” would get, it might possibly rival the masterpiece of “Miss Machine.”
But the album features numerous musical interludes and others, like “Dead as History,” have slow introductions that disturb the syncopated rhythm of the album.
While the “heavy” songs are as earsplitting and raucous as anything they’ve ever released, they come too infrequently and are often quite short.
It could be argued the relatively brief album length of 40 minutes prevents “Works” from overstaying its welcome, but if it’s going to be that short, then it should be filled with more of the abrasive musical abuse I’ve come to expect from the band.
Don’t get me wrong. “Works” is quite good, and played at full volume, it will still shock parents, upset neighbors and wake the baby. But Dillinger, never a band to worry about others’ expectations, needs to not lose focus on their former aural anarchy when trying to incorporate the more “musical” aspects of their music.
At least the album isn’t called “Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water.”
Shawn Dugas can be reached at
