Showing posts with label Dillinger Escape Plan. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Dillinger Escape Plan. Show all posts

7.3.08

Vans Warped Tour

Live show preview
Vans Warped Tour
with Green Day + Long Beach Dub Allstars + NOFX + Jurassic 5 + Dilated Peoples + Papa Roach + Mighty Mighty Bosstones + Dillinger Escape Plan + more
Saturday July 15, 2000, Randall's Island, New York City

All the mega-package tours that have come and gone (and are still going) since Lollapalloza first rampaged across the USA must be judged against it, and Van’s Warped Tour, perhaps the least hyped of all, remains truest to the spirit of ‘palooza, while offering the most bang for the buck.
Key factors in Warped’s success are the reasonable ticket price, a huge number of bands and more a non-musical diversions than a concert-goer could hope to absorb in one day. At the Washington, D.C. stop last year, there were five music stages, two “extreme” sports rings, countless booths, giveaways and autographs sessions, as well as people eager to pierce and tattoo your flesh.
The 2000 edition’s headlining acts won’t be quite as blistering as last year’s Emeniem/Blink 182 finale, but Green Day is a solid live band and the Dilated Peoples are highly entertaining. The standout performances should come from a pair of inventive metallers--- California’s extra-heavy Papa Roach and New Jersey’s impossibly complicated Dillinger Escape Plan. Both put simps like Metallica in proper perspective. Also watch the side stages for the inspired Dick Dale-isms of Stingray.
Warped Tour founder Kevin Lyman wisely aped the marketing skills of NASCAR (the number-one spectator sport in the USA) and now keeps a dizzying roster of sponsors front and center. If you can handle logo-overload, there are myriad free offers which a savvy attendee can turn into an armful of free discs, posters and stickers in exchange for a little info.
Warped is essentially a California-bred event, and no matter how New Yorkers feel about skateboarding and bike trickery, watching these “athletes” soar into the sky on a tiny slab of wood while live bands thrash away around them does bring a certain gut-level thrill. Wisely, the fest is alcohol free, and some of the largest crowds of the day usually turn out to be at the water stands. Indeed, water will probably be the only thing you will leave Warped feeling like there wasn’t enough of.

Time Out New York, 2000

Dillinger Escape Plan

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