The Dillinger Escape Plan - Miss Machine (2004)
With this release, they officially debut their new, current, and ultimately final vocalist Greg Puciato to the masses by promptly having him scream right in your fucking face as soon as the CD is popped in. Any doubts or worries about "oh man, they lost Dimitri Minakakis, can they still pull it off?" is immediately taken care of, because Greg Puciato was a huge fan of the band before he joined, and dammit, it SHOWS: He gives his all throughout this entire album, be it his hoarse shouts, his maniacal high screams, his Mike Patton-esque singing style, or even SPOKEN WORD! FUCK! A mathcore vocalist doing spoken word vocals?! That must be challenging as fuck! I can't even imagine Greg Puciato going through the drive-thru at Wendy's without screaming at the person taking his order. Maybe they had to inject him with horse-sedative to get him to make any noises below 100 decibels. I'm guessing that sedative didn't also poison Mike Patton in the process, since he seems to come out of Greg Puciato's voice-box for the entirety of "Setting Fire to Sleeping Giants", down to the deep-voiced spoken verses to the sung chorus, it sounds like (of course, if it didn't have all of that cool mathcore shit going on) it could've been on "King For a Day, Fool For a Lifetime", but hey, I'm not complaining! It's just a bit strange, following their previous collaboration EP with Mike Patton, "Irony is a Dead Scene".
The rest of the band is just as maniacal and insanely talented as ever before, but this album sees the band going out of their comfort zone by trying shit that isn't meat-and-potatoes mathcore, like having some sung choruses and some industrial influence ("Phone Home" is such a love-letter to Nine Inch Nails it's unreal), but one of the biggest changes is that some of the songs are, and I don't use this term loosely ever since people on the internet ruined it for me, but some of the songs on this album are EPIC! "Sunshine the Werewolf" has an incredible industrial-esque instrumental (iii) in the middle of it leading into a vocal explosion of "DESTROYER!! THERE'LL BE ANOTHER JUST LIKE YOU!! YOU'RE NOT THE ONLY ONE, I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE, DESTROYER!!!!" and the rest of the song in general reaches heights that you would've never thought were possible during the era that Dimitri Minakakis was the vocalist for this band, but if you still want some mathcore that'll make you want to punch brick walls, this album has it: "Van Damsel" might just be one of their heaviest songs, with the drums hitting you like rapid punches. The first time I heard this song, I had no idea what the fuck was going on, but I knew I liked it, and that's generally how I feel about this album.
The album really just doesn't let up with great songs! "Baby's First Coffin" is another great example of a KILLER tune and the band reaching into uncharted territory: Greg Puciato screams his head off, the instruments go wild, all that crazy stuff, but then it gets quieter and he recites a poem he wrote for a minute or so (you think I'm gonna look up exactly how long he does that shit?), and then it launches back into KICKING YOUR ASS with high screams leading into truly frantic sounding screams to end the track on, and hey, speaking of that whole Faith No More comparison I made earlier, there's a tune towards the end called "Unretrofied" that's good but it sounds like it could be a fuckin' Linkin Park song! Seriously, listen to that and then "Numb" and if you tell me otherwise, you're fuckin' delusional.
So I guess there's a song or two on here that sounds like Faith No More, one that sounds like Nine Inch Nails, and one that sounds like Linkin Park, but they -all- sound like Dillinger Escape Plan in their own little ways, be it the technical expertise of the instruments or the overall attitude/energy that can't be denied, these guys leave a very distinctive audible footprint on every track on here, as if to say "Yes, this is new, but we're still Dillinger" and I love it, because as much as I loved "Calculating Infinity", it'd sure fucking suck if they spent the rest of their musical careers trying to replicate that album, especially when they (as of this album) have such a talented and versatile vocalist to match the immense talent of all of the instrumentalists, it'd just be an awful waste of incredible musicianship to have their efforts fall victim to musical monotony. Fuckin' great album by an amazing band.
9/10
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