I’m going to hazard a guess that during yesterday’s music-packed evening in D.C., the only show that could rival Peter Brötzmann’s trio in intensity was The Dillinger Escape Plan at Rock & Roll Hotel. If you’ve seen DEP before or you read my writeup of their Baltimore show this past Feburary, you know the drill.

R&R Hotel had a few security guys lined up in front of the stage to try to keep control. I asked one of them if they knew what they were in for. “Oh yeah, we know all about it,” came the confident reply. The thick padding taped over the venue’s giant wall mirrors, and the ceiling above the stage, seemed to confirm this, but the “NO STAGE DIVING / NO CROWDSURFING” signs posted everywhere were overly optimistic.

Photos and a few more thoughts after the jump. Full gallery here.

I suppose the show was relatively tame by DEP standards—Rock & Roll Hotel has no pillars for people to climb and jump off of, no balconies for band members to scale, etc.—but being in the crowd still felt like hanging on for dear life in the middle of a violently depressurizing airplane. The band willfully ignored the restrictions on stagediving and crowdsurfing (though in retrospect, I didn’t notice any audience members following their lead). Their fog machine quickly filled the venue with a thick haze, and since the Hotel doesn’t exactly have great ventilation, the room became ridiculously hot and after a while I wondered if the fog machine was even still needed or if evaporating sweat from the frenzied crowd was having the same effect.

Musically, DEP seemed to be in fine form, although the sound sucked up front so it was sometimes hard to tell. Still, it was good enough that there were some obvious highlights, like the classic “43% Burnt,” and a surprise appearance of DEP’s Aphex Twin cover “Come to Daddy.” I was a bit disappointed that there didn’t seem to be any new material played, which was surprising given the band will be recording their new album next month.

But setlist nitpicks are just that—nitpicks—and all that really mattered was that DEP whipped themselves and the crowd into a sweaty delirium for 70 minutes.

Full gallery here.

The first track on The Dillinger Escape Plan’s latest album is called “Fix Your Face.” This title likely refers to what anyone who attends their concerts will need to do at some point during the set. For instance, myself: about three-quarters of the way through DEP’s insanely intense show at the Ottobar last night, guitarist Ben Weinman kicked me square in the nose while doing one of his spin/jump/stagedive moves. I’m surprised it only happened once. With crowd surfers, stage divers, Weinman, and vocalist Greg Puciato flying over my head all night, emerging unscathed was a minor miracle.

If you’ve never seen DEP live, well, go check them out on YouTube, because even if you’re not into their dissonant, mathy brand of metal, you’ve gotta respect a band that spazzes out as completely as this one does the instant it hits the stage. (Relatively tame example: this one.) I will never understand how they—Weinman in particular—can be human pinballs all night while still nailing every single crazy time change and off-kilter riff in their twisting compositions.

Puciato, a Baltimore native, praised the Ottobar crowd for consistently matching the band’s insanity, and he wasn’t making it up: fans were climbing support beams and jumping off them into the crowd, surfing onto the stage only to get thrown back off again, singing along to every word, and headbanging with an intimate familiarity of each and every odd-time riff. Also of note was new drummer Billy Rymer, who acquitted himself well given the difficulty of the material, and the setlist, which drew evenly from the band’s three full-length albums and included both their old-school mathcore stuff and their newer, more melodic songs.

DEP mixes the precision of metal and avant-rock with the raw energy and physicality of hardcore, and the combination is pretty much mind-boggling in a live setting. If this doesn’t end up being one of the best shows I see all year, at the very least it will almost certainly be the most viscerally intense ones I see all year. Or ever again, for that matter, at least until I see DEP the next time around.

More photos at Flickr.