I’m going to start this post with a request…nay…a demand. I’m going to need you to suspend, at least for as long as it takes you to read this nonsensery, everything you know about your own taste in music. Done? Good.
I’m going to talk at you today about a band called The Dillinger Escape Plan. They may be one of the most underappreciated, overlooked, and moderately successful bands in the hardcore/metal/math-metal/spazz-core scene. Honestly, I hesitate to try to attach them to a specific “scene” as there really aren’t any bands that do what they do…at least with any level of success …but I’ll get into that in a bit.
This band is headed up by their special-minded, weird-sound creating, prodigy or maybe un-diagnosed clinical psyche patient, lead guitar player Ben Weinman. I don’t know what beautiful-mind-type things go through this dude’s head, but what comes out the other side is either the purest form of musical genius…or speaker thrashing, headache inducing, noise…played as loud as he can. Allegedly, the writing process starts with Ben sitting at his laptop, guitar in hand, punching chords, time signatures, digital effects, mathematical formulas mapping the path of an electron through a gamma ray infused rare earth magnet, and planetary coordinates into some sort of recording program. What comes out is a series of boops, beeps, bleeps, and bloops. This all gets arranged and structured (?) into a working song/piece/composure/collection of noises.
I’m going to stop there. If you’ve taken the leap and listened to anything on their myspace/purevolume web pages yet, you can see what I’m getting at. The music is ridiculous. It’s cacophonous, it’s spastic, it’s generally difficult to follow…and it’s this initial impression and quality in their music that first drew me in.
When recording, a band will perform dozens of takes of the smallest passages to get the tiniest section just right. Bottles of aspirin are consumed by everyone in the control room while they try to focus in on the minutest details of the most minute guitar lick trying to pick out its every flaw so it can be redone to perfection. But it’s this hardly discernible lick that will inevitably tie together the phrase it’s in, which in turn will pull the song together and link everything together. So with that in mind, you have to understand that in nearly every song, every note has been painstakingly thought out, recorded, re-recorded, and analyzed. Now that we’re aware of this and listening to a song like “Fix Your Face,” it has to be assumed that each part of that song was carefully laid out and performed for a very specific reason (like that weird scale at 0:36). The quest to understand that reason is what I spent a lot of time trying to figure out.
After listening to their most recent record, Ire Works, a couple times through I had a bit of a breakthrough. The first 8 tracks range in spasticness, tempo, key, mood…everything. It’s a trial to get through because it’s such a barrage of discordant passages, out of key lines, alternate rhythms…man…it’s almost like work to listen to at times. But the 9th track, called “Milk Lizard” starts. The song almost feels out of place in its straight forward nature. It has defined verses, choruses, bridges, and even though there are few strange passages with those awkward, out-of-key scales, the song sort of made sense. It all clicked.
What these guys have managed to do was take common musical theories, de-lobotomize them, and turn the principles of successful music-making all on its ear. Contrasting the beginning of the record with Milk Lizard, you can understand that Dillinger Escape Plan has shown you that they CAN write a rock and roll song. But that’s boring and predictable. They’ve taken bluesy, jazz inspired riffs and scales (which push and pull the lines of genius and severe musical retardation at times in their own right), sped them up by six or seven hundred percent, screamed over it all, and called it music. Going back and listening again, you hear all these reaaaally subtle textures, scales, and sweeps that if was slowed down, played in a more delicate fashion, would in turn sound like a beautifully composed jazz piece. Listen to the song “Mouth of Ghosts” (it’s not online, so you’re going to have to buy it on iTunes or something…I promise you won’t be disappointed…it’s an INCREDIBLE song that’s INCREDIBLY composed). You can hear, and almost track, how The Dillinger Escape Plan blend together the most complex, delicate passages that define blues and jazz into the spastic, screamfest that is 90% of their musical repertoire. Fascinating!
When Picasso was a kid, he painted landscapes, still-lifes, and portraits at the caliber of the classical masters in painting that were believed to be the definition of artistic perfection. But the ability to paint in a style that’s been mastered was boring. (I’m basing that statement on nothing.) So Picasso seemingly rejected that whole style and made up his own. But if you look carefully at any of his blue period pieces, his cubist work, his sculptures, it’s clear that he had a very clear understanding of the principles of color, shape, field, etc (ran out of art terms) that he got from his training under classical artists. Using this knowledge, he expanded the scope of art into a new understanding. With their understanding of music (popular, successful music at that) The Dillinger Escape Plan has opened up a whole new dimension in the realm of music.
Check it out…it’s a total mind fu
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