The Dillinger Escape Plan @ Concorde II
Sometimes words just can’t really explain situations and experiences. Pictures and videos help, but unless you’re there, you just can’t get to grips with the awesomeness of a situation. Sunday night was one of those experiences. I am still, 2 days on, absolutely flabbergasted. ‘The Dillinger Escape Plan’ are quite simply the greatest live band I have ever seen.
Seeing your favourite bands play live is usually filled with inevitable disappointment. The bigger they are, the less they care, the more tours they do and the more money they make. Not so with ‘The Dillinger Escape Plan’. Energy, aggression, flawless delivery, I really don’t want to continue writing this as it will inevitably turn into one large act of fellatio on ‘The Dillinger Escape Plan’.
Mixing material from all their albums to fantastic effect, I am seriously trying to pick holes in a stunning performance. The harder more frantic efforts from ‘Miss Machine’ and ‘Calculating Infinity’ mixed in perfectly with the newer material from the fantastic ‘Ire Works’. Even Mike Patton’s effort with the band was thrown in.
So negatives…….hmmmm………..I hate the Concorde II. My car was scratched on the way in…….the price of petrol is really quite staggering.
The more and more I think about it, the smaller the holes that are there to picked at become. The band literally delivered a flawless performance. A performance I would have gleefully paid for 10 times over.
There’s something you can’t quite put your finger on with this band. You love them, but you don’t know why. I’ll be honest, recently I’ve found it harder and harder to listen to this particular genre. It’s become too intrusive to my ear drums, the fun I used to have dancing around to it has all but disappeared. And yet, these guys just keep coming back at me and punishing my ears into submission and yet leaving me literally gasping for more.
Sometimes you know you’re involved in something special. From the moment they burst in with the set opener, filled with raw aggression and witnessing the crowd go utterly apeshit, I knew this would be the case. Up until this night, my stories about best gigs ever involved a woefully biased portrayal of a rather lethargic ‘Tool’ performance and slightly more embarrassingly, ‘Muse’ at Reading 2002. Finally I have found something worthy of the tag. Unrelenting, demanding all possible superlatives available to man, Ladies and Gentlemen: The Dillinger Escape Plan.