In a dizzying blitz of brutality, violence, color, sound, and beauty, The Dillinger Escape Plan brings their Option Paralysis to life like some sort of contemptible Frankensteinian monster.
This is a record that lives and breathes like a fucking vile fiend with diodes showing and ill will, like ice water, in its veins. This is a record that haunts children and stalks innocent people in the park, tearing them limb from limb and devouring the pieces with a sick, bleeding smirk.
This is the type of album that you’re not supposed to know what to do with. It’s the type of record that fucking perplexes you while it beats you senseless with eternal chasms of noise, hostility, pain.
To this incessant eruption of violence, however, the Morris Plains madmen offer soft chords of lean beauty and deep attentive progressions not often found in a record of this steep anxiety. It’s an incredible skulking creature, this Option Paralysis, but it’s also an inspiring joy to experience. It’s one of the best records of the year and it will continue to be. I promise.
In many ways, The Dillinger Escape Plan has returned to the foundation of convulsive post-hardcore that made Calculating Infinity such a divine treat. With the band winding through unruly, dim, deepening valleys of convoluted jazz-ish metal, vocalist Greg Puciato treats us to an amazingly diverse and colorful showcase of his talent. When he’s not growling and scratching at our eardrums, he’s tuning up Pattonesque scorn and showing some serious pipes.
The trick, if there is one, to understanding The Dillinger Escape Plan is to let the density melt like mud into the bigger picture. It’s easy to get carried away by what each of the five is doing. It’s easy to get lost in drummer Billy Rymer’s fanatical, spiraling hammering, for instance, but it’s better to drop yourself to the whole.
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