It's hard to imagine music less in tune with indie rock values (or just plain rock values) circa 2012 than whatever it is the Locust is doing on Molecular Genetics from the Gold Standard Labs, a collection of obscurities that packs 44 songs into almost as many caterwauling, grinding, ugly-ass minutes. Screeching bursts of arrhythmic synth noise? Microseconds of groove suddenly obliterated by a minute of hairy blast beats? Torturous polyp-producing screams? Fucked-up time signatures that would give migraines to all three members of Rush? These sounds are not doing big business on the summer festival circuit.
Not that greedy-eyed A&R men were grooming the Locust for stardom 15 years ago either, but weirdly I knew a lot of people who saw them as the fashion-conscious and crossover-hungry version of the hardcore underground's ultra-violent streak. With scene politics blessedly in the rearview of my life, this take seems patently insane to me now. Maybe it was the goofy onstage costumes or the knowingly kitschy packaging. Because otherwise, how could anyone listen to this stuff and think "sell-out" unless they'd fallen so far down the extreme music rabbit hole that anything less than total sensory assault felt like pop?
On the other hand, canny marketing might be the only explanation for how these guys, as ferocious and uncompromising as any of their peers, found themselves as the deranged cousin to the screamo explosion of the early 21st century. This was music so intrinsically alienating that it could only ever hope to appeal to a small coterie of pain-addicts and assorted other masochists. One did not buy records by Spazz or Crossed Out or even the Locust because they wanted to make nice with their wider peer group. Here's how your "standard" Locust tune goes: The band screams and bashes for a few seconds, pulling tricky extreme metal moves with a hardcore band's looseness and brute force. Then everything drops out for a goofily sturm-und-drang breakdown, or keyboards that sound like incidental music from some schlocky 1950s sci-fi flick. Some more bashing and screaming, and we're out in less time than it takes to microwave a defrosted frozen burrito.
True, occasionally they throw the creepy-crawly electronics up front or at the rear for a change of scenery, which with stuff this potentially monochromatic is important. From this collection: "Moth-Eaten Deer Head" comes over like a horror movie in miniature, the shift from the intro of wheezy keys to the full-on roar of the song itself being the moment where the protagonist throws open the bedroom door to find the whole place drenched in gore. Best is when they actually solder the electronics into the flesh of the songs. "Well I'll Be a Monkey's Uncle" opens with a shrill announcement from some alien Emergency Broadcast System, but it's also got one of the record's best riffs, even if it happens to be played on a tortured synth set-up.
All of these four-dozen-plus blasts from the id are head-wrecking, dizzying, pick your disorientating adjective at will. And not just because they're usually over before you can grasp any sense of their herky-jerky structures: It's because the Locust still try to pack as many mood swings, tempo shifts, sonic zigzags, and genre curveballs into their briefer-than-brief running times as possible, all while never letting up on the aggro and abrasion. "How to Become a Virgin"'s ridiculously fast stop-start drumming still manages to punch some of heavy rock's traditional catharsis buttons. They even manage their own bug-eyed take on the multi-part rock epic with "Flight of the Wounded Locust", operatic and positively indulgent at almost three minutes long, at least in the context of an album where the shortest tune is a brutal fart of hate called "Cattle Mutilation" that lasts 27 seconds.
Calling these songs "obscurities" is a bit of a joke in itself. They may have been released on relatively hard-to-find vinyl at the time, but they're only a few shades more primitive than stuff on 2003's Plague Soundscapes, the album that found them listed on the same accounting ledgers as Tom Waits. The Locust's later stuff may have enmeshed the electronics and the grind with a little extra finesse and ambition, and it was certainly recorded a hell of a lot better, all of which meant you could almost mistake them for a spazzier and less Hot Topic-friendly version of the Blood Brothers. Not so much here. Sometimes the murk on Genetics means the painful high-end chirpiness of the keyboards is the only thing with any definition, and they're not much interested in reaching out to the kids so much as musically smacking them around. But their basic attack on their quasi-major albums remained the same as on their first album: 1998's The Locust, collected here, which was "underground" thanks to both its label and the fact that it sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of Buffalo Bill's basement.
The Locust clearly know that the only way to avoid coming off like novelty music for grindcore kids is to play both sides of their shtick as straight-faced as possible, and with as much brutalist conviction as they can muster. Which isn't to say it still might not hit you as novelty music, especially in such a large dose of gross, if you don't already have a taste for this stuff. The long-haul of this whole comp, even at less than an hour, is designed to separate the gawkers from the legit geek-show fans. Tentative newcomers may want to start with their later, higher-def, and slightly more "accessible" albums. For those of us who delight in gross-outs and wacko caterwauling and oppressive noise for its own sake, Genetics is a lo-fi and hideous laugh riot.
