The
Dillinger
Escape Plan
by Morgan Y. Evans
LINKS:
My friend once said that The Dillinger Escape Plan doesn't ever need any more press because 1) everyone knows about them already, and 2) slavishly worships them. While this may or may not be true, if you don't know about Dillinger by now, you are definitely a complete idiot. They've changed the face of modern metal forever with the landmark release Calculating Infinity, worked with the likes of Mike Patton on Irony is a Dead Scene and expanded their sound on their previous effort Miss Machine.
Dillinger have battled uphill all the way. self-managed by founding guitarist Ben Weinman. Despite enduring line-up changes, including original singer Dimitri Minikakis being replaced by the now formidable and well-regarded second vocalist Greg Puciato, band member injuries, and recently, the departure of longtime drummer Chris Pennie for Coheed and Cambria at a crucial time for the band, Dillinger can't be stopped.
Undeterred, Dillinger soldiered on, coming back from what could have been a death blow with a new drummer (Gil Norton of Stolen Babies) and a new record, Ire Works. The new CD encapsulates all they've ever been while expanding ever outward. They remain one of my favorite bands of all time, standard-bearers for the evolution of music, heavy or otherwise.
MORGAN Y. EVANS: All right, man. So, I love all your releases. You guys are one of my favorite bands, ever. Every time I hear new Dillinger it is weird, because my old roomie used to play Calculating Infinity every day to try and learn it. Once again, new record Ire Works is an amazing release. It encapsulates all the band has ever been while still breaking new ground.
LIAM WILSON: Thanks.
MYE: I was wondering, being capable of playing so many styles, how do you know when an album is done and you took it as far as you could go?
LW: Well, it’s kind of hard. I don’t ever really think we know when that is, so much as it’s just like we kind of try to set a deadline. We didn’t wanna take as long as we did the last time. That was pretty much all we knew. It becomes an issue of if we wanna use [producer] Steve Evetts, when is he free? It becomes other people’s schedules more than ours.
MYE: Get the right team.
LW: Exactly. And once Chris Pennie left, it was like, “Well, when is this Gil Sharone dude gonna be available as the new drummer to be off tour and able to record?” Things like that. When we got to a certain point, I think we had the record like, two thirds done, at least in our heads…two thirds of it demo’d and an idea of what the rest of it was we were going to do, it became like, “Well let’s figure that out in the studio." Or, "We’ll figure it out once Gil comes in and we talk to him. We don’t want Gil to bite off more than he can chew.” I’d rather have ten amazing songs than thirteen with some half ass ones. This time around I think we got everything.
MYE: Sometimes people say you take a long time between LP’s but with all the programming and arrangements, it ain’t kid stuff. The same with a band like Tool.
LW: Yeah, and unlike a lot of bands our creative process is a little different because we don’t live near each other. It isn’t, “Let’s get in the practice space and do this”. It’s a lot of Ben sending me a demo on yousendit.com and I’ll listen to that at home and send something back. A lot of it isn’t as personal, but you hope when we get in the studio it all comes together. And I guess Steve Evetts is the make or break with that, saying if something works or if he thinks we should work more on something.
MYE: Your bass frequency is really good and full bodied. Songs need that. You guys or even an indie rock band like Silversun Pickups benefits so much from good bass. In a lot of metal, particularly the worst of black metal, things are so treble-y and hiss-y sometimes. Listen to Darryl Jenifer of Bad Brains and learn, kids! Low end equals balls!
LW: I kept at Steve saying “Dude, c’mon!” I felt the bass was never represented well enough in this band. The best it ever got was on the Under the Running Board EP, and we haven’t been able to get back to that since.
MYE: Some of Miss Machine, though…
LW: Some of it did, but I mean, even like, “We Are The Storm”, that was one of the last things we did and that came out a lot better than “Sunshine the Werewolf”, which was one of the first things we did on that album. I really like what I played on “Sunshine the Werewolf”, but I don’t think the tones came out as good. For me, on this album especially, I wanted to make sure it was rockin’! Otherwise, it just sounds like a metal record.
MYE: Yeah. You guys have some rock’n’roll parts mixed in there as well, and I think of you guys, and this is true for a great West Coast band New Dead Radio as well, where the good bass sounds make it more punishing and legitimate, you’re living it, but it adds the rock’n’roll punch.
LW: Even a song like “Milk Lizard” or “Party Smasher” needs some ass to it! Give it some ass! Otherwise it is really high end and hits you right at the eyes. I don’t want our records to sound like that all the time.
MYE: I think the craziest two mosh-pits I was ever in, one was a Clutch show at Bowery Ballroom right before Y2K, where they actually played “Binge and Purge”, which they stopped playing because people always got hurt. The other was a Dillinger show at the Electric Factory in Philly years ago with Snapcase and H20, I think. You guys played “43% Burnt” and the place just fuckin’ went off! Do you guys ever look out there and think, “Uh-oh, what’d we do?”
LW: Well, I mean, yes and no, unless somebody is just getting trampled. There have definitely been times I’ve seen someone crowd surfing and just drop or stage dive and nobody catches them. It’s like, “Aww, man.” I’m excited they were moved to that level of excitement, but I don’t necessarily take responsibility for what happens. I’m in as much danger as they are, you know. (laughing)
MYE: (laughing) Even from your band mates, notoriously so. “Horse Hunter” and “Fix Your Face” on the new album both have great names, by the way. How was it getting original singer Dimitri Minikakis and of course, Brent from Mastodon on those songs?
LW: The Dimitri thing was, we all went to a wedding over the summer for our former manager. It was everybody but Chris Pennie at that wedding. It just felt like a cool little Dillinger alumni reunion. We were joking around with Dimitri. Old bassist Adam Doll was gonna leave New Jersey for the first time in ten years. He has been in a wheelchair forever, but he was gonna fly to California and was hanging out with us. We tried to convince Dimitri to come out too, and joking around said, “You know, you should throw down some back up vocals.” Dimitri just had a kid. His wife was pregnant and he couldn’t make it, but he and Ben still live close to each other and we’re all still on pretty cool terms. I talk to Dimitri at least a couple times a year. Ben ended up going home before Greg and I, as we had some stuff to finish up. So he was on a deadline that Greg and I didn’t actually have because he’d bought his plane ticket months earlier. So we sent him the tracks when he was home and Dimitri just wailed them in Ben’s room. Set up in his room and emailed the track back. The Dimitri thing was barely an afterthought but came out great, something simple to beef up the part.
MYE: And get fans psyched.
LW: Yeah, the Brent Hinds thing—we’d run into him and he said he wanted to do backups for us sometime, and we thought it’d be cool but didn’t think much of it. And then one day he calls us and says “Are you guys in California?” And we said we were, and he says, “Ok, I’m flying out tomorrow.” So he came out, and we had most of “Horse Hunter” and that, when we went to California, was barely a demo. We cleaned it up a little bit and gave it to Gil and asked if he could make musical sense of it. He came out with something, so we tracked it and then Brent came out, and we had most of it together but the one part he sung over we’d said, “Ok, why don’t you see what you can do there”. So he sang over it, and we’d had some ideas but nothing concrete. But once Brent laid it down, it took the song to a totally new direction, and we kind of built the rest around that. It opened Greg up a lot too, because he thought, “Ok, well now I’ll try something else to accent that.”
MYE: I interviewed Candiria a while ago at CBGB’s for their 8 month return gig after their famous van accident, this was back before they sadly broke up. We even filmed it and hopefully it’ll see the light of day sometime, but the crowd at that show, it was great to see people appreciating their diversity. You guys also have a lot of diversity. I’ve been listening to this Spanish world music guy Manu Chao's new record, La Radiolina, which is such a collage of brilliant styles, but in metal sometimes still a lot of bands still play it safe. You guys helped bring back experimentation a lot, so how does it help to see or hear how you helped broaden someone’s musical perception or taste?
LW: It feels good. And I’ve given this answer for sort of different questions, but I sort of still think it applies… But I remember when I was a kid buying like, an Ozzy record and loving it when I was like, seven, being voracious about how there was always a sound I was looking for. It’s almost like a food you crave and can’t find so you’re gonna eat everything you find on the planet until you find it, and it’s like, “Well, ok, I don’t think it exists," or "Not yet.” So you start playing and it becomes your responsibility or mission to make that record or at least get closer to that goal. You have to recognize you’re never going to do it. It’s kind of a perennial quest that will never, end but it’s an honor to feel I’m pushing boundaries and hopefully people will respect it. At times, it’s frustrating because you feel you might be pushing too much, but we could’ve gone much further (laughing).
MYE: (laughing) I’m sure you could’ve!
LW: Maybe when I’m done and look back on music, I’ll hear how it shifted things. A lot of the times, I hate to say it, but I hear bands who say we're a huge influence, but I’ll catch them live and the influence is that they swing their guitars and are really loud, and that is missing the point. It’s an honor, but also like a double-edged sword.
MYE: “Sick On Sunday”, talk about pushing boundaries! I thought that song was so dope when I heard it. It sounds like Aphex Twin and Milt Jackson writing a spaghetti western porno soundtrack with Slayer! Dude, how did you guys come up with that?
LW: Real quick, let me toss this into the last question. I think that… (interrupted)…Don’t you dare!
MYE: huh?
LW: Sorry. Someone’s trying to taze me on the bus with a taser.
MYE: That’s awesome. “Don’t taze me, bro!” (laughing) I was in a Misfits tribute band, Wolfsblood, where everyone had to get tazed if they wanted to join.
LW: We have a tazer and they are trying to fuck with me... But, I think the double-edged sword comes in when people accuse Faith No More of birthing NuMetal. Or like, I don’t wanna be the band like Korn that turns every band to shit by starting the trend that backfired.
MYE: It’s so whack when they say that about Faith No More.
LW: So there’s the Catch-22. But “Sick On Sunday”, that was something Ben was fooling around with that we were like, “Hey!” We felt there was a place on the record for it, and so once we had it recorded better we started thinking about song sequencing. And before we tracked it, I didn’t know what we were gonna do with the end of it or if it was gonna be simply electronics and nothing more. So again, once we got in the studio and started re-tooling it, I recorded a relatively simple bass line at the end. Greg came in and did the vocal and it was like, “Holy Shit!” It’s short and sweet but definitely has an interesting place on the record.
MYE: Yeah.
LW: It was exciting. Aphex Twin and Slayer are definitely in there.
MYE: As far as “Black Bubblegum” that starts out reminding me of pigfuck stuff like Scratch Acid or Jesus Lizard and then the vocals kick in and they are so bratty and almost sassy. It’s dope. It seems like Greg sounds more confident with his singing voice than ever.
LW: Yeah. I think you’re at your best when you’re done recording. You’re like, “Shit! I wish I could do that again.” That’s definitely how I felt after Miss Machine and how I felt this time. Miss Machine was the first experience of that line up working together as a band. I’d done the Irony EP, but that was a lot different. That was my first experience working with Steve and getting used to it, and y’know, right after Miss Machine we had this confidence that it took us until the Ire Works sessions to get back into. There’s things on Miss Machine that definitely bother me. I can’t listen to that record all the way through without thinking “Shit!” and wincing at certain things that I let slide or didn’t fix. I didn’t stand up enough for myself with Steve Evetts and say it couldn’t be like that. This time around we went into it like, “Fuck That! We’re not backing down. This is our record, not Steve’s.” So this time we had more confidence, and Steve was more open to us because we came more prepared.
MYE: But you guys have a good working relationship, right?
LW: Yeah, we definitely do. Steve’s just such a ball breaker.
MYE: (laughing) I’ve heard he’s a powerhouse.
LW: I don’t know if you’ve ever worked with ProTools or anything, but by the time we were done working with our tracks, it just looked like a bar code. Hitting everything again and again, and even if it is one note he’ll have you whack it, and I don’t even know what he’s listening for!
MYE: Phil Collins style.
LW: (laughing) Yeah. I’m thinking, “This is absurd, I’m like, bleeding!”
MYE: (cracking up)
LW: It’s intense, but he gets a great product and I trust his methods.
MYE: How did you know that Gil from Stolen Babies was the right replacement for Chris Pennie, who was obviously such a big part of the band for years, and also are you still on good terms with Chris Pennie?
LW: Well, the Gil thing, it was like, we had a friend, Chris [Hornbrook] the drummer of Poison the Well, who said, “Dude, I know this guy. He’s perfect.” We listened to his different stuff and talked to him, and he was playing stuff for us over the phone, and it seemed like he had a grasp of these songs. And we finally played with him and within two or three songs it was apparent that this guy rules! We played “Fix Your Face” and thought, “Shit, this dude rules!” He tracked the stuff on the record with only a few days of rehearsal.
MYE: That’s great! I can’t believe it.
LW: Yeah,
that alone was a testament to him definitely being the dude and once he
was done tracking his parts, we were still busy with ours, but on breaks
we’d teach him old songs. “Ok, let’s go over '43% Burnt',”
because it was one thing to go over new stuff, but if you wanna tour with
us you have to learn that kind of stuff also. He worked hard and figured
it all out. He learns really fast. It wasn’t much of a decision.
He’s not an asshole.
As far as Chris Pennie, um…I haven’t gone out of my way to
talk to him. I definitely feel like that dude left me and Ben and Greg
in the trenches. I know Greg talked to him a bit, and Ben doesn’t
have any plans to talk to him anytime soon. He did send me a text message
two months ago that was kind of like, “Hey, record sounds great.
Good luck with the touring cycle.” I was kind of like, “Thanks,
that means a lot coming from you, but I don’t really know what to
say. Don’t take it too personally but for the minute I don’t
wanna start talking via text message. If I run into you or we start playing
shows together, that’s one thing.” But maybe we’ll sort
out some differences.
MYE: It’s unfortunate when things like that happen between such former great friends.
LW: Yeah, and ultimately it makes me realize that we weren’t such good friends as I thought. I would never do what he did to us, to my friends. Other people have said it in other interviews, that if you’re the dude for that band, then you aren’t the dude for this band, and I’m not gonna worry about it beyond that, but it doesn’t take away the fact that he left at a critical time. And whether he had issues with Ben or not he didn’t have issues with Greg or I, and he kicked us in the balls, too. I respect and thank Chris for giving me the opportunity to join this band and take my career to a new level, but you were killer for six and a half years, yet the last six months you were a total douchebag. I don’t wish you ill will, but I don’t need people like that in my life.
MYE: Sorry to hear that. It is what it is. Last question, were you guys mad when Anal Cunt wrote that song about you guys “Anyone Who Likes Dillinger Escape Plan is a Fucking Faggot?”
LW: Hell no! I don’t think you can take that kind of band seriously. I like that band, but I don’t think you can take them seriously.
MYE: No, I mean “ValuJet”. C’mon.
LW: The fact they say it is an honor.
MYE: It was pretty funny when they had the lyric “John Zorn said I would like you.”
LW: (laughing) Yeah. I mean, if that’s Seth’s way of complimenting us or even if not, it’s an underhanded compliment.
MYE: He’s kind of the Weird Al of grindcore.
LW: Yeah, I mean, he used to write songs about people in comas and then the dude goes into a coma. It’s a joke. He’s kind of a G.G. Allin of sorts, where you can’t judge him on reality standards and have to judge it by where he’s living at.
MYE: Well thanks a lot brother, it’s been an honor.
LW: Thank you, Morgan.