The Locust:
Bobby Bray - Guitar/Vocals
Joey Karam - Keyboards/Vocals
Justin Pearson - Bass/Vocals
Gabe Serbian - Drums
Plague Soundscapes is probably the most fitting name this album could possibly have. The record's entire length comes out to 21:03, yet there are twenty-three tracks, with names such as "Anything Jesus Does I Can Do Better", "Earwax Halo Manufactured For The Champion In All Of Us", and "The Half-Eaten Sausage Would Like To See You In His Office". If this sounds pretentious, think again - if anything, the songwriting is on the far side of abstraction, constantly switching gears from crude sexual references to politics to social issues to complete and total randomness. Though the lyrical quality probably won't be an issue for most, since the vocals bring forth visions of a person in such a hysteria that their words no longer make sense and have become desperate shreiks.
If there were words to describe this album other than "plague soundscapes", they would probably be "total insanity". Few tracks make it over the minute marker, none are soft and beautiful or accessable pop music. This is technical madness at its highest scale. The vocals are scizophrenic wailing, the time signatures are constantly changing, the drums are switching from offbeat punk to unweildingly fast grind, the guitars and bass are all over the musical chart, and there are industrialized insect noises distorting the entire package.
While this would sound bad to most people, it takes about two listen-throughs (less than an hour) to find the nuances, the diamonds in the ruff that make up the record. It's the spastic and constantly shifting mood that give The Locust their edge, their trademark sound. If you have an open mind, you'll be able to pick out the chord sequences, the odd jazz/punk/metal rhythms, even the vocals, and see how they all come together to make something more than just noise pollution. While the songs do have a specific sound to all of them, they are all different once you are able to see the little things that make each one interesting; it is truly more than just pounding nonsense and crazy screaming.
Plague Soundscapes is one of those albums so abstract that it raises the bar for so many other bands that are in The Locust's field of music, such as Converge, The Dillinger Escape Plan, and Coalesce. This isn't as expirimental as others in its genre - it is an unweilding, concentrated blast of insanity, and in the end, that's what makes it the album that it is. If you like hardcore or grindcore, and you like it unrelenting, then it doesn't get much better than this.
Rating:
4/5
