Water turns to blood; prize farm animals keel over dead; darkness and disease cloak the earth; hail rains from the skies; frogs arrive with small armies of lice and flies and locusts; and just when shit seems impossibly fucked, you have to fend off that nagging death plague by splashing lamb's blood on your stoop. That notorious run of bad luck already went down once, way back in the day, but in Spring 2003, The Locust are kicking it Moses-style once again, prophetically offering an aural equal for Jehovah's Old Testament punk-slap.
Those witnessing this cataclysm for first time might like to know that The Locust, a once-five-now-four-piece have been kicking around SoCal since 1995, and though this is only their second full-length, they've managed to keep busy with related projects: everyone but keyboardist Joey Karam plays in the dentally inclined Holy Molar, bassist Justin Pearson's in Some Girls, and drummer Gabe Serbian's was, until recently, a member of both the meaty, super-speedy death metal band Cattle Decapitation and Alec Empire's backing band. And then there are the members' humble beginnings in seminal hardcore (or just plain hard) bands like Swing Kids, Struggle, Crimson Curse, etc.
Over the past eight years, The Locust have opted for spatial concision and elaborate packaging for their releases, and though things go out of print all the time, there are (and were) splits of many sizes with Man Is the Bastard, Melt-Banana, and Arab on Radar; a self-titled seven-inch and another self-titled twelve-inch; a five-inch picture disc split with Jenny Piccolo; a double twelve-inch with remixes of "Well I'll Be a Monkey's Uncle" by Kid606, I Am Spoonbender, Christoph de Babalon, and others; a reissue of 2001's Flight of the Wounded Locust EP on four seven-inches that fit together like a puzzle; and finally, this brand-new 21-track CD clocking in at under 21 minutes. And though they sport tight bug suits, rest assured: this music is no joke.
Similar in a sense to the now-defunct American spazcore band Behead the Prophet No Lord Shall Live (who, incidentally, took their name from Deicide's Legion), The Locust locate themselves within a downpour of musical over-determination, attention-deficit-disorder time restraints, and a nod-nod, ha-ha twenty-something sexual irony sealed in a rapid-fire hardcore assault. And in a serious case of coincidence, Behead the Prophet's vocalist took the stage name Joshua Plague some years ago while fronting The Mukilteo Fairies. Ah, Plague! Listening to The Locust's Anti Records debut, I was thinking how nice it'd be if these 23 songs weren't referencing the good book at all, and were instead a tribute to the great, under-appreciated screamer behind two rad bands, and his smart-ass gay politics and hilarious And Now I... zine series. Alas, independent rock tosses aside history constantly. As much as I want to hold out for beautiful in-scene props, I imagine the nod wasn't intended.
Whatever the theme, Plague Soundscapes is among the band's fiercest work yet, and stands as their most sinisterly melodic to date. Clearly attuned to their genre's precedents, the band produces long song titles for tiny bursts of noise: "Halo of Pubic Hair and Earwax Manufactured for the Champion in All of Us" is 58 seconds, and "Late for a Double Date with a Pile of Atoms in the Water Closet" but 45. When the band does lock into an epic jam like the minute-plus "Twenty-Three Lubed Up Schizophrenics with Delusions of Grandeur", they make certain the sounds remain spastically off-kilter within various densities and layers of drones and lasers and accelerated mosh parts.
Elsewhere, "Anything Jesus Does, I Can Do Better" clocks in at 1:29, spitting up code amid crunchy headsmashing and ends with a blissful Yars' Revenge raga. Showing a bit of noisy growth, the robots-do-battle instrumental "Can We Please Get Another Nail in the Coffin of Culture Theft?" is Pork Queen/Trackshun pretty. Throughout Plague Soundscapes there's lots of high-end scratching, romping double-bassdrum (the opening of "Solar Panel Ass" is as heavy as Slayer), faux-explosions, more than a dozen non-standard noisemakers, claustrophobic keyboard blasts of bodily fluids and dislodged earwax, and vocalist/bassist Justin Pearson's incessant snarl-- all expansive while remaining aesthetically lodged within the confines of hardcore.
Obviously, The Locust aren't singularly reinventing music, but it could be said that Plague Soundscapes is, along with a handful of similarly minded bands, redefining hardcore, and with a modicum of pretentiousness. Sure, the shit's a bit inaccessible-- the guys are just bashing this stuff out-- but there's never a shred of elitism. Christ, it's four dudes with no faces squeezing into tight pants and feigning murder on the dancefloor. And you hear it in every note they play: The Locust simply love what they do. With Plague Soundscapes, The Locust shot for broken bones and wound up epitomizing "breakneck." Have you been injured in an accident?
