The Dillinger Escape Plan played a super cheap four dollar show at the super small First Unitarian Church with the super great Kayo Dot and Medications. This was one of the best Dillinger performances I have seen, which I find myself saying just about every time I see them (and I’ve lost count of how many Dillinger shows I’ve seen). Such a distinction is especially rare amidst musicians of their jaw-dropping technical proficiency, whose opportunity to be violently thrashing and leaping about is usually eclipsed by their need to concentrate intensely on what they’re playing. However, in spite of the fact that Dillinger’s music is downright academic, its unrelenting brutality tends to attract a breed of fans that is absent an appreciation for dynamics, so Kayo Dot’s alternately beautiful and jarring avantgarde chamber metal was unfortunately not well-received by the predominantly meaty crowd. Medications, successor to the short-lived and criminally overlooked Faraquet, played a very energetic set of promising new material. I’m very much looking forward to a release from them.