The Locust - New Erections

The Locust
New Erections
Anti-
Grade: A-

Though not as epically epic as you would hope or that the Locust could produce, the eleven-track latest New Erections finds new moments of glee within the buzzing, fluttering noise to continue your addiction of spiked Locust noise. As with all Locust material, these songs are best experienced live – so strap up your boots and head to your nearest show to be dazzled and let the band convince you whether this set fights along side their others.

Following through with their previous two releases, the full-length Plague Soundscapes (Anti-) and the Safety Second, Body Last EP (Ipecac), the Locust try to reinvent the spazz-core sound they helped define in the San Diego scene. The ploy on New Erections is actually a slowed down, more directed attack. The spazz has disassembled to a sputter, but the results are even more enticing. Instead of just throwing random walls of shit at your head, the Locust have more of a design to their bullet stop-starts, electronic swarming, and screaming movements.

At a short, taut twenty-three minutes, New Erections begins on the worst song amongst the eleven with “Aotkpta.” After the random blipping stop-starts, the song grinds away with vocals that don’t fit the feel; unless the feel is to sound like crap. Thankfully the slowed vocals are immediately replaced on “We Have Peached…” with classic Locust vocals, stop-starting structures, and down-thrashing guitars. Swarming electronics fly above your head on “The Unwilling…” before the languishing breakdown, while “One Manometer Away…” follows “We Have Peached” but here with an awesome galloping rhythm to the vocals, drums, guitars. As with many of the songs here, “Full Frontal Obscurity” demonstrates the need for a close listen on headphones as the instruments are constantly scanning from left to right and right to left. Through their sound and use of modulating, the Locust have perfected this skill of creating an uncomfortable feeling on something or like someone constantly hovering above you. The disjointed “Scavenger Invader” merely sets up the scream assault of “Hot Tubs Full of….” “God Wants Us All…” has a basic spazz structure, straight-down riffing matched with mechanical vocals, before the Locust spin off into a heavy breakdown. As the longest song on New Erections, the four-and-a-half minute “Book of Bot” sounds unfortunately like it could have been born by many a band; which for the Locust takes terrific effort to achieve. New Erections closes on the balls-out “Slum Service (Served on the Sly)” that uses too much talking, and the rollercoaster riffing “Tower of Mammal.”

The songs on New Erections can only be truly digested after a through headphone listen accompanied by a live performance. If the past is any judge, New Erections will add fuel to the band’s inflammatory blazing live show. For any band thinking of having the Locust open, just forget it – they’ll make you like sloppy and amateurish like they did to the Fantomas on their tour several years back.