This came out in 2002 – or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
You know, I’ve heard some freaky-ass records in my time. But few are as outlandish as this jaw-dropping EP from The Dillinger Escape Plan and Mike Patton.
In case you don’t know, the Dillingers are the most mathematically skilled and intensely devastating hardcore band working today — imagine King Crimson with shaved heads and a steady diet of PCP. Patton, meanwhile, is the gonzoid former singer of rap-metal pioneers Faith No More. Putting the two together in the studio on the four-track Irony Is A Dead Scene has produced the same effect as tossing napalm onto a grease fire. As the band blaze psychotically through the intricate pyrotechnic maze-work of their epic spazz-metal constructs, Patton snaps, snarls, whimpers, shrieks and bellows about Hollywood Squares, Pig Latin and When Good Dogs Do Bad Things. The overall effect is what we would imagine it’s like to be kidnapped from your bed by evil aliens who dose you with meth, then lash you to an electric fence so crazed dogs can snap at your gonads and escaped mental patients can pitch gravel at your head. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
