by RAF KATIGBAK

Around this time last year, the Central Asian plains were struck by the worst locust infestation in decades as swarms reaching 10,000 bugs per square metre devoured everything in sight. Now, a year later, a new locust threat is poised to wreak havoc of biblical proportions, but this time, it’s headed for Montreal. While locusts (the bug) lay waste to crops and vegetation, San Diego’s the Locust (the band) are out to obliterate death metal, hardcore, punk, new wave and sci-fi film music with minute-long blasts of hyperkinetic freak-out music. “We’re trying to be a plague on the subconscious mind of the collective consciousness of the world,” says guitarist Robert Bray, “an ugly wrench thrown into this monstrous machine.”

With death-metal drum blasts, otherworldly noise bursts, indecipherable sung/screamed vocals and quick tempo and time-signature changes, their songs are fast, brutal, complex and will fully destroy you. Preferring to fit into either no category or every category, for the last seven years the Locust have been busy taking the word “extreme” back from the alpine unicyclers and chip-flavour people to the underground.

“Part of the problem with the hardcore scene,” says Bray, “was they all just wanted to stay in this tightly-knit little club. We don’t want to be part of some club. Everybody should be invited to enjoy us. It’s art, it’s music, and it’s for everybody.”

While this may make the Locust the most accessible unlistenable band ever, it also makes them one of the most challenging and engaging. While most of hardcore’s overtly political rhetoric is already preaching to the converted, lyrically the Locust prefer a more subtle approach (what could be more subtle than a song title like “Who Wants a Dose of the Clap?) “For the most part, a lot of it can be interpreted in different ways. It’s almost a commentary on communication and language itself. We’re trying to recreate a communication between band and person listening to band.”

In the end, says Bray, the lyrics act as a Rorschach test, revealing as much about the listener as it does the composer.

As a band that has been labelled one of the most influential new hardcore acts around, when it comes to their own influences, Bray prefers dropping science to dropping names. “I’m really into quantum physics. Music is vibrations per seconds. The whole universe is also vibrating at a certain vibration per second. That’s the whole thing with unified field theory, they’re trying to explain the four great powers of the universe—gravity, electromagnetism, and the two nuclear powers—under one little equation. They’re trying to see how these four forces harmonize together to create this strange place we live in, the fifth dimension. Sometimes when music harmonizes together it might be similar to the way the universe is vibrating, like a metaphor on a different scale but at the same time. Kind of like how a nucleus has electrons and the sun has planets, same thing, different scale. That’s what we’re trying to do, always trying to push a multi-dimensional type of experience. Maybe in some strange hidden part of the brain we can perceive that, but can’t really fully understand it or explain it. Which is kind of the whole thing about music—it reaches what language cannot, which is pretty much the most important thing that I can think of.”

With Sinking Body, Chinese Stars and les Georges Leningrad at Foufounes Électriques on Thursday, July 17, 7:30pm, $12.50

>> Music Listings