YMMV / The Dillinger Escape Plan

• Awesome Music: Arguably everything they've recorded. Some particularly prime moments include Irony Is a Dead Scene; their frenetic, radically different cover of "Paranoid"; and "Mouth of Ghosts", which is just one of the most flat-out beautiful songs in the metal genre (though arguably, about three quarters of it has nothing to do with metal whatsoever, fitting more appropriately under jazz or progressive rock).
• Broken Base: Fans are split between those who appreciate more or less everything they've recorded, and those who think everything they've done since the EP with Mike Patton has been an artistic failure.
• Epic Riff: The opening riff from "43% Burnt" is probably the first thing that comes to mind when they're mentioned; it's one of the few musical ideas in their back catalogue that could be called "catchy". Little wonder that they've played the song at every gig they've played since they wrote it. Ditto for the main riff of "Prancer".
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With fellow mathcore band Ion Dissonance. It's all a matter of musical heaviness: ID fans say that TDEP is not heavy enough, while TDEP fans say that ID sacrifices too much musicianship to reach high levels of heaviness.
  • Another rivalry has sparked up with American Metalcore act The Ghost Inside. The reason is that the cover to The Ghost Inside's latest album, Dear Youth looks a lot like the cover to DEP's One of Us Is the Killer. Read more about the drama here at Metal Injection.
  • With Disturbed. The situation initially appared to be mainly based on a misunderstanding, as someone informed Disturbed that TDEP's guitarist had been mocking them for their elaborate stage set-up, when in reality he was merely making an off-hand remark about how little they themselves bother rehearsing. As the guitarist from TDEP put it, when Disturbed use a pyro onstage, they don't get set on fire by it, as has happened at TDEP gigs. Draiman later said, "No beef with them. I think the press misquoted them once. We cleared it up." However, not longer than a few months after Draiman said that on his Twitter, Greg Puciato ignites it again on his.
• First Installment Wins: Calculating Infinity is the only full-length Dillinger release that nearly all fans can agree upon as being good.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Just "Mouth of Ghosts" as a whole, really. The piano solo on "Widower" may also qualify depending on one's tastes.
• Narm: A lot of people thought this about "Widower" from Option Paralysis, a full-on Power Ballad:
  Pitchfork review: But sudden eruptions of emotive crooning feel out of place. The icky mix of cocktail piano and emo melodrama on "Widower" is a major offender. It's not just that the inevitable math-y freakout derails the song's sense of momentum. It's also that DEP's notion of what constitutes "pop" is so damn corny. Forget Faith No More, the most frequent point of comparison. Without Mike Patton's sense of the absurd to undercut the pomp, this shit sounds like Foreigner with an affinity for blast beats. DEP don't need to worry about "softening up" or (gack) "selling out." They need to worry about the fact that 3/4ths of Option Paralysis is astounding and 1/4th is plain cringeworthy.
  • Narm Charm: On the other hand, a lot of folks also love it and some even name it as one of their favourite songs by the band.
• Nightmare Fuel: The videos for "When I Lost My Bet" and "One of Us Is the Killer" feature violent, gory imagery and are quite horrific.
• Never Live It Down: Any interview will Greg will bring up two things: his infamous performance at Reading Festival 2002 where he defecated in a bag and threw it at the audience, and the Golden Gods 2013 performance where he cut his head on a drum cymbal and started bleeding all over the stage.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Fans were not pleased with the announcement that Greg Puciato was to be the band's full-time singer, especially given his "meathead" appearance and decidedly obnoxious persona, but he's gradually earned a lot of respect over the years. It helps that he's shown himself to be a pretty versatile vocalist.
• Once Original, Now Common: Calculating Infinity can be this these days because it's been copied so much that it's difficult to appreciate how truly original it was when it came out.
• Signature Song: "43% Burnt".
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: "Mouth of Ghosts" again, despite the Big Metal Ending. You could probably sleep to it.
• Tough Act to Follow: Calculating Infinity. Much of the experimentalism on its follow-up, Miss Machine, was there specifically to avoid accusations of the album being "Calculating Infinity 2".

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