THE DILLINGER ESCAPE PLAN | LIVE REVIEW
Tramshed, Cardiff, Mon 23 Jan
After 20 years of pushing the envelope, The Dillinger Escape Plan are calling it a day, having reached what they call a “thematic conclusion” with most recent LP Dissociation. Tonight’s show never feels like a funeral though: the impending end is not mentioned by the band and certainly never overshadows a strangely uplifting night of sonic battery.
Openers Primitive Weapons, provide a solid start to the evening. Serrated guitar work overlays tremendous grooves on songs like Old Miami and they get many a head nodding – think Helmet at their most caustic.
Following them, HO99O9 provide, in many ways, the ideal support act to a band as innovative and unconventional as The Dillinger Escape Plan. Twin MCs TheOGM and Eaddy (think Dennis Rodman in a dinner suit and HR in a wedding dress) go off like a nuclear bomb onstage, howling and lurching around to thunderous live beats and heavy slabs of industrial noise. They are abrasive, intense and appear to give zero consideration to genre boundaries – quite the appetiser ahead of TDEP’s delightfully hard-to-swallow main course.
Limerent Death, from Dissociation, crowbars open the headliners’ set and in four minutes sums up all that TDEP have become over their two-decade-long evolution; demonstrating no adherence at all to songwriting conventions, its frequent changes of pace provide maniacally energetic guitarist Greg Weinman opportunity to show off his supreme talents, while Greg Puciato, always one of the most intense frontmen in the game, howls and looms over a willing audience.
The pulverising Sugar Coated Sour is chucked out early and, with its contrasting breakdowns and noodling jazz segments, is a brilliant reminder of just how important 1999’s debut LP Calculating Infinity was. A diverse, never less than ferociously intense album, it revolutionised heavy music – taking Meshuggah’s chaotic heaviness, filtering it through hardcore’s brattish energy and mixing it up with marvellously nutty guitar/drum breaks, it still sounds ground-breaking and fresh today.
The rest of the set packs in the highlights from the band’s relentlessly inventive catalogue, from the raging Low Feels Blvd to the NiN-influenced Black Bubblegum, which produces the biggest singalong of the night. For a full 90 minutes The Dillinger Escape Plan rattle the skulls of all assembled, leaving an exhausted crowd baying for more. What better way to go out?
words and photos HUGH RUSSELL