The Locust Are One Scary Band

The Locust have taken hardcore to a very scary place, and now the San Diego foursome are taking their manic, creepy and earsplitting sounds to your place — they're currently trekking across the U.S. The tour finds them playing shows all over the country, from New York and Worcester (and Montreal and Toronto in Canada) to Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and San Francisco.

If you do attend a show, be prepared to be scared. The Locust appear clad in skin-tight, androgynous uniforms, often donning alien-looking masks and illuminating the stage with crazed stage antics meant to push the crowd's buttons, The Locust are frightening beyond their shrieking hardcore sound. The Locust reach inside your gut, twist it and force you to feel, intensely.

And The Locust are having the time of their life onstage. "It's this weird state of mind — you become irrational and you have adrenaline, all these endorphins and really high energy," explained lead-singer/bassist Justin Pearson in a phone interview this past spring. "It's like a dream state — I know that sounds cheesy, but it happens and you go, 'Oh, that was it?'"

The band — Pearson, drummer Gabe Serbian, keyboard player Joseph Karam and guitarist Robert Bray — are touring in support of Plague Soundscape, their second longplayer, which was released on Anti/Epitaph Records June 24.

The band's songs deal with political and societal issues. "The music we create is a product of our society," explained Pearson, who also runs San Diego's hardcore/post-punk label Three One G Records. "If we all lived in a rainforest somewhere, there'd be a lot more peaceful music. We're on edge and fed up and angry, dealing with all these issues that come into our lives. It's not like we're consciously going, 'Let's write fast, mean music.' It just comes out.

"It comes from our mindsets," he continued. "Look at where we live. Look at this world we live in — it's so fast-paced. The media, computers, having a job and all this traffic and all this shit that goes on in day-to-day life — it carries over."

Carrying over into penetrating indecipherable screeching and a nightmare onslaught of insane-asylum-sounding instrumentation, Plague Soundscapes — laid down at Hollywood's Grandmaster Studios — gets under your skin like a heart-pounding panic attack. It's hardcore cracked out on some sort of upper and made terrifying for its unrelenting wiry spasms. It's fast, intense and very, very scary.

The Locust, who released their self-titled debut album in 1999 on GSL Records, formed in 1996 with a heavy hardcore influence and without a format. "We didn't set out to sound like we do," Pearson said. "Over time, things just happened. We [started] using a lot of electronics and effects and we all got a little better musically and we started writing from a more creative perspective — not typical four-four timing stuff. But it was never sought out. It's weird. People are like, 'How did you come up with it?' And We're like, 'It just kind of happened.' When you mix the chemistry of people, crazy shit happens."

For a listing of tour dates, please check the Epitaph site — Jenny Tatone [Tuesday, July 15, 2003]