The Dillinger Escape Plan
Calculating Infinity

THE REVIEW

I bought this album without knowing what I was getting into... I had never listened to the band before (nor especially ANYTHING LIKE IT!), I purchased it solely driven by the reputation it had.

As soon as the first track started playing, my entire normal perception of "music" was obliterated. I was faced with something finally different: it seemed like a group of "instrument virtuosos," a true progressive band, was trying to bring "chaos into music," but a NON-RANDOM chaos, super technical, with unpredictable time changes, interwoven guitar riffs that distort in an incessant crescendo of schizophrenia and creativity... with the addition of a rhythm section that would send chills even to the most technical bands, with techno-death accents "à la Meshuggah."

The album is not excessively long, lasting about half an hour (excluding the hidden track), but in my opinion perfectly so, for with such a challenging musical proposition, it was better not to overdo it: thus, the choice to focus more on quality rather than quantity!
As for the songs, I definitely recommend the title track "Calculating Infinity", an instrumental with a techno-funk-noise beginning, "43% Burnt", the frantic grind-noise of "Clip The Apex... Accept Instruction" and "4th Grade Dropout" with an interlude almost foretelling the style that Converge would adopt in Jane Doe.

The flaw in my opinion might be the vocals, which never quite convinced me, but it can easily be overlooked while letting yourself be carried away by the total sensory and psychological annihilation that this band manages to induce.
There are also almost "industrial" moments, associated with certain guitar sounds or the mechanical nature of some riffs that almost seem to go into a loop, as if the record were constantly skipping. Indeed, don’t expect a consistent 4/4 throughout the album; it’s a continuous alternation of syncopated, odd rhythms, difficult to assimilate.

What else to say... I recommend this album to anyone in search of schizophrenia in music!!!