live @ 930 Club 10.22.2000
Aging horror punkers The Misfits are no longer a very relevant musical entity, but at least they still have good taste. They proved it by inviting one of the most inventive bands in ‘heavy’ music today---fellow New Jerseyites Dillinger Escape Plan--- to open for them at the 930 Club Monday night.
Chewing up every genre and sub-genre of heavy metal music and regurgitating it as a gnarled wire tumbleweed, DEP hitches a pummeling beat (courtesy of savage drummer Chris Pennie) to vertiginous speed-metal time signature changes while vocalist Dimitri Minakakis gargles razor blade vocals. The title of their lone full-length recording, “Calculating Infinity”, gives some indication of their aspirations. More relevantly, the Dillingers make scary-metal-band du-jour Slipknot sound like Phil Collins by comparison .
Not surprisingly, the quintet couldn’t quite reproduce the kind of jaw-dropping stop/start precision they manage on their studio recordings, but they came close on songs like “The Mullet Burden”, in which guitarists Ben Weinman and Brian Benoit played as if they were trying to remove their chest hair with their instruments. DEP’s music is so dense, it is difficult to comprehend for sustained periods, so the 28-minute set was an ideal length. When they closed with the massive heave of “43% Burnt”, the band’s keyboard player nonchalantly reproduced the fire breathing trick of Kiss’ Gene Simmons in lieu of a solo; it was a testament to Dillinger Escape Plan’s power that the flames seemed merely quaint next to the molten assault of the music.
Washington Post, October 2000
