The Dillinger Escape Plan

Rock Sound talks to Dillinger Escape Plan guitarist Ben Weinman about 'Option Paralysis'.

The Dillinger Escape Plan have been holed up for much of 2009 writing and recording their fifth album ‘Option Paralysis’, the first release on their own label Party Smasher Inc. Rock Sound caught up with guitarist Ben Weinman to discuss the album as work with producer Steve Evetts neared completion:

So how long have you got to record ‘Option Paralysis’?
“We’re doing it in about a month which is really short nowadays for a band, the reason we wanted to do that was because we thought it was stupid to waste a lot of money. People need to learn how to be efficient and we just feel like we should be able to do it in a month, especially since we did ‘Calculating Infinity’ in two weeks. We’re trying to get back to that attitude of just going for it, doing it. We stopped fucking around and came prepared to make this record.”

How is new drummer Billy Rymer working out for you?
“Billy was setting the pace for a while as he’s got this nervous energy that we had when we weren’t sure about what we were doing, you can hear it on the record. He’s just playing very aggressively, like he’s not comfortable at all and he’s trying his best to just blow his own mind while also adequately filling the big shoes. I have never heard more drum notes than I do on this record, he’s just going crazy, man, and I’m not telling him how insane his drumming is because I want him to keep pushing himself.

We had one more day of drumming left and his arm was so swollen he had to take a day off and we’ve never had to do that. His arm just looked ridiculous, he had to soak it all day and he couldn’t move it. He was scared that maybe his career was over, that he had already ruined his hand but the next day he felt fine and we finished it all.”

How does the album sound?
“It’s a lot darker, it still has the jazzy overtones and the experimental nature but there’s a lot more darkness to the chord changes and things like that, a lot more metal, I guess. It sounds like it’s still Dillinger but it’s still got the metal elements that were present in the earlier stages of our band. There’s this element of thrash, dark thrash to some of the chord changes that were a little less apparent on some of the last records.”

What is the album saying?
“This is the first time I haven’t heard vocals for our songs. I was always much more involved in it in the past and now that Greg [Puciato] has moved to California it’s kind of hard to bring it all together. I have no doubts in Greg, he said he’s got every song ready to go and he says he’s on top of his game. We’re actually going to start demoing vocals today so I’m looking forward to finding out.”

Any guests on the record?
“Well, there are two people in particular, we’ve never toured with either of them. They’re a couple of people we were talking to and they’re both from completely different worlds to Dillinger. I’m pretty excited and proud to have them on the record, it’s going to be interesting to see how it turns out.”

Any other schemes on the go at the moment?
“I’ve been thinking of doing a social network-based website with a couple of partners that have the same kind of ideas that I do. I’m not going into too much detail about that yet, but I think it’ll definitely fall inline with everything I’m talking about as well as the concepts on ‘Option Paralysis’.”

What are your views on the current state of music?
“There’s so much media out there that nobody knows what’s important anymore. The whole indie record label culture and indie band culture is gone now, it’s still out there if you really search for it but it’s not how it used to be and it’s really surrounded by a lot of message boards and Myspace pages that tarnish the whole thing. Back in the day there were record labels that you trusted, loved and you bought everything on it and you discovered a lot of great new music because of it. You listen to every single song back to front a million times, it’d be worn out to death before you moved onto another record. You’d read everything in the booklet, you’d read all the lyrics, you’d read all the notes, you’d discover something new. It was unpredictable. Now even the most musical nerds are reduced to being no different to the person we know just listening to the radio.”

Andrew Kelham