CALCULATING INFINITY

Cold, aggressive, gripping and destructive, 'Calculating Infinity' is the debut album of American mathcore band The Dillinger Escape Plan, released in 1999. Now, mathcore is a very abrasive, technical and extreme sub-genre of heavy metal music, popularized in the late 90s due to the success of bands like Dillinger, often mentioned as one of the pioneering acts of the movement. While all of this might be true, this band is much more than just another heavy act as they display a profound taste for the progressive, a desire to experiment and take the genre further, always intertwining the blatant aggression with various influences that are not necessarily associated with mathcore - all of this is this debut album in a nutshell.

With the overhaul of complex arrangement and incredibly energetic and technical playing, there is a very clear direction to this album and an overall sound that is cohesive, concentrated, and entirely violent, making 'Calculating Infinity' one of the most compelling and exciting heavy albums of the decade, allowing a large chunk of avant-garde sounds and techniques to "penetrate" the sonic picture resulting in an intelligently crafted combination of complex time signatures, manic tempo changes, atonality and dissonance. Of course, this remains a tough listen due to the dynamic nature of the music as well as the harshness of the vocals but beneath all that lies a really fascinating experiment and a solid album that indicates one possible future path for heavy music, and certainly one that aligns with the spirit of progressive. Some of the really fine tracks that complement such opinions would be '43% Burnt', a scourging excursion into avant-garde metal territory, 'Jim Fear', which is a straightforward blast, the dramatic and aggressive sound of 'The Running Board' as well as the calculated title track and the more experimental 'Weekend Sex Change'. A lot to unpack with 'Calculating Infinity', a mad, driven, noisy and surreal work of extreme musical brilliance.

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