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The Dillinger Escape Plan.
 The Dillinger Escape Plan emerged from New Jersey in 1997, quickly gathering a fan base with their intense live shows and the infamous self-titled demo. The band secured the support for 45-date US tour with Mr Bungle a month prior to the release of their first full-length album 'Calculating Infinity' in 1999. In 2001, vocalist Dimitri Minakakis announced his departure from the band. The band released a stop-gap EP 'Irony Is A Dead Scene' with Mike Patton on vocals while they began their search for a new vocalist. The man they found was Greg Puciato, whose vocal ability brought a new dimension to the band, bringing elements of both Minakakis and Patton. Throughout, Puciato is modest about the situation.
"They lost their singer, they had auditions, I auditioned and they told me I was in the band," is how Puciato describes joining one of the most eclectic outfits of all time. "It wasn't some mystery process or anything like that."
The band made their first appearance in Australia in 2004 to great enthusiasm.
"That was a lot of fun," Puciato reminisces. "We had never been to Australia before and we didn't know if anyone was going to come at all. It could have been a total disaster. The first show we played was in Sydney and there were about six hundred people there; we thought we'd show up and maybe 10 or 15 people would come."
The Dillinger Escape Plan then returned to the studio to record 'Miss Machine', the first album to feature Puciato. "Last time we came we didn't have a new album out; our last album had been out for four years, so this is a really exciting time for us to be touring behind all this new material."
The new album is even more complex than its predecessor; something that the band consciously sought in all stages of the writing process. "Everyone really concentrated on the flow of the entire album, not just the flow of individual songs," says Puciato. "We wanted people to put this album in and not really feel like you could really understand the scope of the album from one or two songs. We wanted people to start at track one and go all the way through, and have it take them on a ride."
Having joined Dillinger after several releases, Puciato finally had a chance to put his own part into the creative process. As he explains: "It is a lot different. It's the process of coming up with a song that didn't exist, then you as a band record it, and you put it out, people buy it and listen to it, and they come to the show and they know it. It's kind of like completing a big circle. When you're on stage singing songs that you had a part in writing it makes you realise the significance of the whole process. Whereas before, singing things that Dimitri and Mike wrote, it feels similar to perform them but I don't know exactly what they meant when they wrote certain lines or their significance. When you're singing the songs you wrote you can remember thinking, 'I know exactly what this means to me, and now these people know the song and it might mean something to them too.'"
The band is also currently searching out footage, particularly from fans, of the live experience. "We have two DVDs in our contract, and we're working on one now. We've put up a note on our website for anyone with footage to send it to Relapse. It could be from when the band first started out or from last month. I feel like those are the best kind of releases, with footage captured by audience members or fans. I remember seeing Metallica 'Cliff 'Em All' when I was a kid, and even though it was shitty video and shitty quality there was something more authentic about that than some overproduced thing with 20 cameras flying around on cranes."
Matt Redmond
 | The Dillinger Escape Plan play at Fowler's Live on Thurs 3 March. |
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