You won’t have to wait forever for the next album from these mathcore maniacs—at least, that’s their story
by Brandon Geist
Photo by Justin Borucki
“I never thought I’d say this, but can you turn it up a little?” shouts Dillinger Escape Plan’s typically soft-spoken bass player, Liam Wilson, to guitarist Ben Weinman, who has been shredding though parts of a new song at already ear-splitting volume. “Maybe you need to turn down,” Weinman suggests incredulously. “No, I’m just trying to get over them,” the bassist says, gesturing toward the tinted, horizontal window into the adjoining rehearsal room, where some horrible Latino bar band is practicing, their Santana-with-Rob Thomas-style wankery resonating through the wall. Weinman cranks up his amp.
Pity los lonely boys next door because Weinman, Wilson, and drummer Chris Pennie now launch into an instrumental rendition of the new song—as vocalist Greg Puciato looks on, nodding approvingly—and it’s a far-beyond-heavy affair that surely doesn’t just resonate through the wall; it almost takes it down. The as-yet-untitled tune veers between the sort of spasmodic convulsions and acid-jazz interludes for which Dillinger are notorious and a grooving mid-tempo breakdown that should have even metalheads usually turned off by the band’s signature polyrhythmic insanity headbanging along.
The song bodes well for DEP’s highly anticipated new album, which the dudes are hard at work on, and which, they promise, will be out in 2007. Longtime fans shouldn’t be blamed if they’re a little skeptical—it took Dillinger an astronomical five years, after all, to release their last full-length, 2004’s jaw-dropping Miss Machine, the follow-up to their 1999 debut, Calculating Infinity. To be fair, the band did put out a four-song collaboration with Mike Patton in between, but still…
“In the past, we were always like, OK, just do every single tour. And it took forever for our record to come out. This time, we’ve actually turned down tours and stuff to write,” says Puciato. “We’ve consciously decided to try and be more prolific, and try not to spread ourselves so thin when it comes to touring.”
“I’m starting to see a lot of bands making records so they can tour, as opposed to touring to support a record, and I don’t want to be that,” Weinman adds. “I want to make great music and not be like, Oh, I gotta pay my bills, or I wanna go hang out with dudes on the road…”
To provide extra motivation toward that end, DEP have for the first time, according to Puciato, set a deadline for themselves. “With Miss Machine, it was like, Oh, we’re gonna record whenever we record,” he says. “Now we already know that we’re recording in [early spring], so we need to have all our songs done by then, and that’s actually making us more productive, ’cause we feel like there’s kind of a timer running out.”
As of December, when we visited DEP at the Backroom Rehearsal Studios, tucked in the basement of a New Jersey shopping center complete with a pizzeria, jewelry store, and party-supply shop called Giggles, the band already had five songs completed and was almost done with a sixth. Dillinger’s main songwriters, Weinman and Pennie, who both live in Jersey, have been practicing together three times a week since finally getting off the road after almost two years of nonstop touring in support of Miss Machine. Recording much of their work via a single mic set up in the rehearsal room, they’ve been then IMing audio files to Puciato and Wilson, who live in Baltimore and Philadelphia, respectively, so they can come up with their parts. (“This is actually the first time we’ve all been in the same room together since August,” Weinman points out.) None of the tracks have been named yet, though Puciato reports that he has “a shitload of song titles.” Example: “Fix Your Fuckin’ Face.” He adds, “I just don’t know which ones are gonna go with which songs yet.”
The one band member who hasn’t been involved so far—and likely won’t be at all—is guitarist Brian Benoit, who hasn’t played with Dillinger since 2005, after he began to lose control of his left hand in late ’04 and was diagnosed with serious nerve damage. “What really sucks is that the doctors don’t know when it’s gonna get better—it could be a month, it could be 10 years,” says Puciato. “There’s no medicine, no therapy, so he’s just waiting…” “Waiting for Luke Skywalker technology to become a reality,” Weinman interjects grimly.
Prepared to record all the guitars on the album (as he did on Dillinger’s first two EPs), Weinman and Pennie have already made what he calls “some more produced demos with actual layering” on his laptop in his room at his parents’ house. “It’s my little childhood bedroom, probably about this size,” he says with a self-deprecating chuckle, indicating the dimensions of the cramped Backroom stairwell in which this interview took place. “My mom comes up, ‘Ben, you wanna eat a little chicken? I got some chicken.’ I’m like, ‘Mom, you’re on the recording…’”
Despite such interruptions, a lot of good work has come out of that room in the past, including Dillinger’s Black Flag cover on the comp Black on Black and Guns N’ Roses cover on Bring You to Your Knees, as well as their recently released iTunes-only EP, Plagiarism. Featuring covers of Nine Inch Nails, Soundgarden, Massive Attack, and Justin Timberlake(!), the mini-album has had some fans worried about the musical direction that Dillinger might be headed in. “We put up the Soundgarden song on our MySpace page, and kids would be like, ‘I don’t think this is the right direction for you guys,’” Weinman recalls. “Like, it’s not our song. That song was written 15 fucking years ago. These kids had never heard of Soundgarden.”
But while the bandmates say that fans shouldn’t be basing any expectations of the new album on Plagiarism—“No, we won’t be doing any Justin Timberlakey stuff,” pledges Puciato—they also hint that there will likely be a few curveballs, à la Miss Machine’s technofied garage-rocker “Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants” and unabashedly melodic single “Unretrofied.” “I think the idea for this record is to just not hold back in any extent, and that’s not just saying that the songs have to be really crazy and aggressive,” Weinman explains. “It means, if we go for it, we really go for it—there could be something so melodic that it makes ‘Unretrofied’ sound like a fucking Slayer song or something. The point is that we’re not holding back, in any respect.”
