Classic Album Review : The Dillinger Escape Plan - Calculating Infinity (1999)
Few records have been analyzed, overthought and debated like The Dillinger Escape Plan's Calculating Infinity over the last twenty years. Musicians either love it or loathe it. Mathcore nerds will pursue to the end of the Earth to tell you that you need to play guitar and learn music theory to understand it. But I'm sure you’ve never heard a non musician opinion on it that wasn't overly negative. Well, I’m here to tell you that I don't know the first thing about guitar or music theory, but I fucking love Calculating Infinity.
Calculating Infinity is all about embracing chaos and making music that is uncomfortable to hear and uncomfortable it is. Extremely so. Of course, frontman Dimitri Minakakis' contagious, volcanic and unpredictable anger is part of what makes it so appealing to me. But what makes Calculating Infinity unique in my opinion is how Minakakis and guitarist Ben Weinman constantly seem in conversation with one another and Weinman’ s guitar sounds just as fucking angry and unhinged as the mercurial frontman.
The most iconic cut from Calculating Infinity is undoubtedly 43% Burnt, which was part of their live set until their breakup in 2017. Weinman's stabbing guitar riffs change tone or texture every ten seconds or so, while Minakakis desperately hurls lyrics about a dysfunctional relationship being held together by unhealthy, violent desires. It does feel like two lovers swirling around one another and throwing the meanest insults at one another. It’s urgent, ugly and impossible to escape. Very much a staple of their sound.
My favorite song on the record though is Clip The Apex… Accept Instruction. It is the perfect blend of their more furious side and their taste for ugly, jagged experimentation. There's this awesome instrumental interlude in the middle of it where bassist Adam Doll and drummer Chris Pennie take over, making the entire thing collapse for a moment. Part of the appeal of The Dillinger Escape plan is the feeling of conflict in their songs and this one is an all our war between the different instruments.
There are many layers to The Dillinger Escape Plan and Calculating Infinity, but on the more violent side Jim Fear is probably the most intense albeit the most straightforwardly metal moment on the record. It’s very stabby and uneven, but its fury is straight like an arrow. 4th Grade Dropout is another piledriving assault on your ears. The title song also. They’re great and all, but I think Calculating Infinity really shine at its brightest when it embraces its weirder and more freeflowing self.
Because The Dillinger Escape plan often get categorized as the quintessential mathcore band, but it can’t be that easy. Isn’t it? There are elements of grindcore, post-hardcore, industrial and ambient music in their sound, giving it this original, but chaotic texture. A song like the mysteriously named *+.. exists for the sole purpose of anchoring the emotional mood of Calculating Infinity. It feels like going through a dark tunnel to some place unknown until your start to hear fucking bongos in a distance.
FUCKING BONGOS. This is an important detail about this record. Moods keep collapsing unto one another like they’re prey to entropy. You’re never sure how to feel or if how you feel is how you’re supposed to feel. Calculating Infinity keeps you second guessing yourself and that’s one of the aspects that makes it such a powerful and renewable experience. My favorite weird cut is probably the closer Variations on a Cocktail Dress, which I believe is about someone murdering his wife or girlfriend.
Variations on a Cocktail Dress has every side of The Dillinger Escape Plan : Fury, conflicting complexity, moody electronic elements, samples and even silence. This song has perhaps the best use of silence since John Cage's good ol’ 4’33. It is so thick and menacing, it makes your wheels spin and anticipate a violent sound explosion, but really it is used (I believe) to signify death as what is heard on the other side of that silence seems to come from the side of the victim from the beginning. It’s brilliant.
*
There is really not a dull moment on Calculating Infinity. Twenty-two (almost twenty-three) years after it originally came out, it is as vicious, disorienting and groundbreaking as ever. At just thirty-seven minutes long, it never overstays its welcome and keeps its fury credible. Even if you don't know the first thing about music theory, Calculating Infinity speaks for itself. It's jagged, unpredictable and ugly in the best possible way. It has cinematic character that formulaic music has never and will never have.
A true classic.
