Gig review: Greg Puciato at The Key Club, Leeds

“Two nights of going out after shows, Leeds, and we feel like crustaceans,” Greg Puciato tells The Key Club on a chilly Sunday evening. “But not tonight, we say. Not tonight!”

It has been a peculiar few months for the singer and his old group The Dillinger Escape Plan. Last autumn, he implied several reunion offers had been refused since their 2017 dissolution, a claim subsequently refuted by founding member Ben Weinman.

Two months afterwards, the latter confirmed a reformation with original vocalist Dimitri Minakakis, Puciato’s predecessor, for anniversary shows behind their debut, 1999’s Calculating Infinity.

But as his former bandmates embark on a new chapter, their ex-frontman continues to further distance himself in impressively ranged fashion.

On a first solo tour across the United Kingdom under his own name – he is active in three other bands, including Killer Be Killed and Better Lovers – he brings an hour-plus performance to the boil with bone-shuddering heft, bleeding between genre intricacies with the skill of a dexterously combustible entertainer.

Both within and outside his tenure with TDEP, Puciato has proven adept at pushing against the boundaries of metalcore, often at his most thoughtfully engaged when drawn to traditional limits. It is not a knock against his older sound, for which many are here – the bruising salvo of Force Fed and Reality Spiral, which open proceedings, proves as crushingly old-school as they come, spilling out across the venue’s showbox configuration.

With cleaner deliveries and intriguingly pop-adjunct melodies behind much of his new material though, he has found fertile ground for crossover appeal. Songs like Don’t Wanna Deal, which veers from grunge-bark drawls to air-raid screams, or Deep Set‘s swaggering low-slung groove, are seductively scuzzy in disconcerting fashion; even better is A Pair of Questions, with its synth balladry on record given a jackhammer impact live that bludgeons the ear canal with aplomb.

These disparate threads segue together – sans much of their ambient elements – courtesy of a crunching, consummate band, but Puciato remains the draw; he expounds enough energy to function as a one-man furnace, his voice torn raw on All Waves to Nothing.

By the time Evacuation’s industrial-metal stomp and a raucous take on Alice in Chains’ Them Bones closes out proceedings, he looks physically spent. “Where can we go out afterwards?” he cries, brow slick in the gloom. Bed may be best after such bruising commitment.