Six years ago, the band I sang for packed up a rental van and drove 2,219 miles from Los Angeles to Atlanta to tour for two weeks with New Jersey metalcore group the Dillinger Escape Plan. We’d been invited by one of the other openers on the four-band bill, and we wound up playing first night after night, three or four hours before the headliners took the stage. Somehow, in all the hubbub of arriving and familiarizing ourselves with the protocols of a large multiband tour, we never got around to making introductions with anyone from DEP. There were nods and smiles, but no one from either group took the initiative to formally exchange names.
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My band played to crowds uninspired by our music or our merchandise. I made a point of leaving every venue immediately after we finished. One of my bandmates worked for Marriott, which guaranteed us lavish Renaissance suites at Motel 6 prices—glitzier accommodations than the headliners, in fact, albeit through no merit on our part. Within an hour of the end of our set, I was usually in a hot tub, 30 stories above our host city, silent and alone. Hours later, I’d return to the club to herd my traveling companions back into the van.
The Internet tells me this fellow is named Greg Puciato. Option Paralysis, the band’s fourth studio record, is their third full-length with him—when we toured together he had yet to appear on a DEP album. It’s gotten a lot of excited advance press, which made me realize I’d never given the band a fair listen. I figured it was also safely outside Puciato’s Jason Newsted-style probationary period—which must’ve started out rough, given that when he joined they were already working on an EP with Mike Patton, eventually released as Irony Is a Dead Scene. Physically, Puciato is an imposing front man, with Vin Diesel’s musculature and solemn glare. He has an extraordinary attack to his screaming voice—on recordings it sounds like the roar of a TIE fighter in Star Wars. Throughout Option Paralysis he shows off an impressive variety of croons and shrieks.
I gave the album the highway test, driving through several hours of long-distance errands with each song cranked up just shy of distorting. It felt kind of weird listening to so much crunchy guitar and man-screaming in a Prius, so I tried to pretend I was driving a pickup truck. That worked for a while, until I pulled up next to an actual pickup truck and glanced over at the driver, a younger fellow who looked like the kind of guy who might really enjoy DEP. I quickly turned the music down and stared straight ahead in confused shame.
