I must admit, I’ve not been the most astute Dillinger Escape Plan listener. While I still adore ‘Calculating Infinity’, the two follow on albums seemed to dilute the formula. Which is probably why I went flouncing off with newer fancies like Between The Buried And Me. Anyway, three years on, I’ve decided I’ve been a bit harsh, because while I found ‘Miss Machine’ and ‘Ire Works’ to be just blasts of noise (an ironic statement to the lay listener, but stay with me), ‘Option Paralysis’ has more hooks in it than a Cenobite convention.
It perhaps shouldn’t be a surprise, because there were moments on the previous two albums – like ‘Black Bubblegum’ and ‘Setting Fire To Sleeping Giants’ - where they opted to stretch their talents even further to cover those aforementioned melodic hooks. Go, look up ‘Farewell, Mona Lisa’ on youtube, and tell me this isn’t one of the most well-rounded DEP songs you’ve ever heard. It’s got it all: the shuffling offbeat guitar stabs, the fractured time signatures that you’d expect from early Dillinger, but with a more sedate passage that ten years ago DEP would have been content to leave as an instrumental.
It’s perhaps ‘Widower’ that’s the stand-out track. Somehow they take a lounge piano line from the loneliest jazz bar on Earth and take it on a journey that ends up in full-on ‘Under The Running Board’ territory. It’s a paradigm of the territory Dillinger have been moving into: balancing the accessible with the acidic, and always on their own terms. As evident on ‘Gold Teeth On A Bum’. Although it might raise a chuckle with those who remember Green Jelly’s ‘Three Little Pigs’, it’s still at its heart a good song, showing DEP‘s touch at this mid-paced lark has come along in leaps and bounds in the three years since ‘Ire Works’
Speaking of which, if you pine for the visceral days when Dillinger were unwittingly writing the mathcore rulebook, then we have ‘Room Full Of Eyes’ and ‘I Wouldn’t If You Didn’t’, the latter of which has some pleasingly busy drumming that sounds like bongos in a washing machine. In the final analysis, this is perhaps the most complete work yet from them. Like Mastodon’s ‘Crack The Skye’ opus last year, ‘Option Paralysis’ has taken the experimental tendencies that have always been latent in the Dillinger Escape Plan, and ramped it up to its natural finished result. Who knows where they’ll go next?
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