If you’ve been doing your homework, you’re probably aware that The Dillinger Escape Plan are retiring. You’re probably also aware that they released their final album, Dissociation, last Friday. And if you’ve been a good Dillinger fan lately, you’re probably more than a little bummed about the breakup.
But as the DEP gear up for their final tour, guitarist Ben Weinman and vocalist Greg Puciato sat down with the folks at TeamRock for a track-by-track breakdown of the band’s last effort.
Before that, though, Weinman describes the album’s unusual recording conditions:
“Making this record was hard because we started from a very disadvantaged place,” says lead guitarist Ben Weinman. “We weren’t in a studio we’d ever worked in before and we weren’t with our typical producer [Steve Evetts]. I was kind of plugging through the drums with our drummer and just an engineer, trying to be objective and pull as much out of them as possible. Then we started doing guitars in a different studio with our producer that we’ve worked with in the past, and he wasn’t used to the drums because it wasn’t his stuff. And we were recording in the middle of the night; we’d start at 9pm and work right through until 9am. So it was horrible. I felt like a zombie. I was confused as shit and I was having delusions, and I think that made some crazy head space and affected the music, for sure. Then when all the music was mixed Greg started recording vocals in another studio on a different coast.”
Puciato elaborates on the situation:
“We did drums in New York, guitars and bass in New Jersey, and I did half the vocals in one studio in California with one producer and then I went to a different producer in a different studio and finished the vocals there,” adds vocalist Greg Puciato. “And whilst I was recording the vocals we had Kurt Ballou [Converge] mix the music. Then after I’d finished the vocals we had a different producer mix the vocals in with the music. Any normal producer or engineer will tell you, ‘That is not how you make a record.’ You would never make those choices. No one in their sane mind would choose to do that. So this is definitely an album that you could never pinpoint how it sounds exactly the way it sounds; we did so much technically incorrect to get to the final conclusion. But I think that adds to the record.”
Despite the struggle this time around, “Limerent Death” is “one of [Weinman’s] favorite Dillinger songs ever,” and Puciato feels like the bridge of “Surrogate” is “as intense [as anything he’s] ever done.”
SO! Be sure to check out Dissociation if you haven’t already, catch Dillinger on their last tour (because Dillinger’s last tour, chucklehead), and read the rest of the article here.
