The Dillinger Escape Plan, Option Paralysis
Featured Album
Dillinger's most varied, engaging, invigorating album to date
It may only take Option Paralysis 12 seconds to launch an all-out war on your senses, but that full-frontal, out-of-the-gate assault is but one of many red herrings. As it turns out, Paralysis is much more than another harder, better, faster, stronger effort from the Dillinger Escape Plan. Why, on that first track alone (leadoff single "Farewell, Mona Lisa"), we find the New Jersey natives shifting their mercurial moods enough times to warrant a mental health visit.
Don't worry about their well-being, though. After all, the tech-metal vets started striking a strangely beautiful balance between their melodic and manic sides way back on 2004's Miss Machine — their first outing with current frontman Greg Puciato. Since then, that stage-stalking singer and Dillinger's primary play-caller, guitarist Ben Weinman, have gotten more comfortable with the fact that they can be a Meshuggah-schooled Mr. Bungle one minute and a less nihilistic Nine Inch Nails the next. Option Paralysis is the sum of all these parts, coming face to face with the most personal and pitch-dark lyrics of Puciato's career. (Questions of marriage, suicide, existentialism and abject suffering all factor in).
This allows them to cast a pretty wide net. If you dig Dillinger's more vicious/visceral side, there's a couple of obligatory bruisers in the middle of the record ("Crystal Morning, "Endless Endings"). And if you enjoy watching them walk right off the deep end, "I Wouldn't If You Didn't" and "Widower" both feature massive melodies and the piano progressions of Bowie sideman Mike Garson (see also: Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs). Meanwhile, "Parasitic Twins" comes off like a power ballad co-produced by Mike Patton, Brian Wilson and Aphex Twin. It's also the first sign that the band has a blatant pop record in their back pocket, should they decide to ever take that route. We'll be here waiting in the meantime.
