Some months ago, in a moment that might at first seem completely unrelated to the headline of this article, we found ourselves revisiting the Halo franchise. Yes, the videogame – it had been years since we dug into the Master Chief collection, which apparently had received a lot of updates since we’d originally purchased it. This included the optional ability to fly around levels like a… well, we’ll get to that.
Of course, we thought we were going to be able to get an article or two out of it for our Gaming section, but that’s not what actually happened. Somewhere in the first twenty minutes of the second mission of Halo: Combat Evolved, a grunt yelled wildly at… something, probably a grenade… and it hit us: damn, sometimes the grunts sound just like iso vocals from The Locust, particularly something from Plague Soundscapes.
That, as they say, was the lightbulb moment, but it took some time for the idea in the headline to truly coalesce. At first, we thought we’d be able to compile a list of Locust-esque grunt vocalizations, but we found the similarities more symbolic than anything, entertaining as they were.
(Come on, you don’t hear a little JP and Bobby B in there?)
Then we went down the rabbit hole of, ‘wait, Justin Pearson isn’t actually in one of these, is he?’ because not only does the Halo series feature a pretty diverse roster of notable actors like Keith David, Ron Pearlman, Alan Tudyk, Terence Stamp, and even David Cross, but Justin Pearson actually has multiple actor and VoiceOver credits in his overall discography. He did some voices for Uncle Grandpa’s Od-yssey, and even acted in a film directed by Asia Argento. Sadly, we did not see any ‘grunt idle’ or ‘grunt dodging plasma grenade’ credits.
(Justin Pearson is credited with additional voices for Uncle Grandpa, so we don’t exactly know who!)
So in the end, we tried to land somewhere in the middle – here, we present ten moments of The Locust where the chaos goes so hard one can barely calculate it, let alone observe it, although it’s worth noting that math or complexity for complexity’s sake was never a goal for the band. In fact, Pearson confirmed this via email when we initially reached out to see what he thought about the idea:
“I’ll say that for the band, we mostly did not listen to complicated music, as one may assume. The band had pretty eclectic taste over all, and it may not be interesting to see a list with Leonard Cohen, The Birthday Party, and The Cramps… As for technical stuff, well, my technical scale may be broken, but obviously Safety Second, Body Last, which is technically one long ten minute song. That was a mind fuck at times. And there is the start of ‘Aotkpta’ that was a fucker to write and learn. But for the most part, the material was not that challenging for us per se.”
We had a feeling those two would be on the list, especially after trying to decide what section of Safety Second… to choose before ultimately deciding the only way to do it correctly was to include every second of it. Lastly, August 20th is actually Justin Pearson’s birthday, so we’re throwing in a couple bonus bombs at the end to celebrate featuring some of his other projects like Headwound City, Dead Cross, Holy Molar and more, all of which you can get at the Three One G website here.
Let’s get this party started.
10. “Follow the Flock, Step in Shit”
At first, original drummer Dave Astor gives you the impression that the band’s earliest single might resemble secular punk rock with some sloppy 16th’s – but The Locust you know and love takes over with a violent hailstorm and a skittering synth part that resembles the sound like an actual insect. In retrospect, it’s pretty crazy how clear the vision for the band has been from the outset, even if it was evolving faster than roaches in a nuclear wasteland.
9. “Listen, the Mighty Ear is Here”
There’s a sea of high-brow displacement work on this album, and it holds a special place in the band’s discography as first to officially reap the benefits of switching Gabe Serbian from guitar to drums. Technically, he did this first on the Peel Sessions record, but that wasn’t released till years later. Either way, this song is a highlight for us thanks to the increasingly stuttered snare hits leading into that infamous little ‘nananananana nanananana’ part.
8. “Wet Nurse Syndrome Hand-Me-Down Display Case”
It’s the how those discordant, almost straightforward hits melt into thirty-second note blasts with such sickening conviction for us. Also, there are two versions of this song – one from the Peel Sessions, and another slightly reworked version from their compilation. Also, the kicks in the blasts come in just before you think they will, and when you think the track is over, it kicks you again.
7. “Pickup Truck Full of Forty Minutes”
The closer of Plague Soundscapes has some great sound design lurking in the background, but on top of the production is potentially the closest the band ever came to dabbling in mathcore. You can see how this one influenced other influential bands like Car Bomb and The Dillinger Escape Plan in one way, but also bands like The God Awful Truth and UNDER THE PIER in others.
6. “Off By A Long Shot”
“Off By A Long Shot” is a very interesting slice of The Locust, even if like most of their work, you could blink and miss it. Beneath the molten bass tones and agonized shrieks are the bones of a song that shows how it would have been pretty easy for the band to move towards a more melodic or progressive grind like Discordance Axis or Human Remains, but at the same time backs up The Locust’s commitment to not sounding like anything but themselves.
5. Safety Second, Body Last
Where does one even begin with one of The Locust’s most significant contributions to weirdness in general? What starts off as a typically crazed moment for the band becomes something far more unsettling and atmospheric – but as “Armless and Overactive” starts to build steam, it also builds industrial amounts of sludge, and it creates a bizarre sense of push and pull that defines the entire experience. It’s potentially our favorite The Locust experience from start to finish, with everyone pushing it the next level after the already considerable gristliness of everything they’d done before.
4. “AOTKPA”
In a way, what Safety Second, Body Last started, New Erections finished, and brutally so, we might add, but it also shows the massive gains the band was experiencing in terms of vision, attention to detail, and even production. The start-stop orgy of triplets and extended note values at the beginning of “AOTKPA” retain all of the character of what they’d achieved before, but as the song marauders through 6/8 grooves and cavernous refrains, you get the sense that you’re in for a deeper, cerebral experience as the album progresses, and you’re right.
3. “One Manometer Away from Mutually Assured Relocation”
This existential sci-fi teleportation screed has some of our favorite rhythmic shifts in The Locust discography, but not because they’re extremely dense or complicated. For instance, those rolling toms and kicks that lead into the band’s freakish pleas – they’re just right, and give listener’s that random sense of being in on a musical joke, even if they don’t quite get it.
2. “Hot Tubs Full of Brand New Fuel”
“Hot Tubs…” is actually one of The Locust’s most musically coherent songs, even if it’s jarring. Although one could count the intro / refrain using simple quarter notes, for everything that follows 00:25, good luck with that. It’s not just the complexity in the parts that makes this one a standout though, it’s the way it fades out with an ominous… dishwasher sound? That’s noise rock as fuck.
1. “Tower of Mammal”
This is probably our favorite Joey Karam line, and that’s saying a lot – are those groupings of fives in the beginning? Six? Thirteen? Who knows – the song’s breakneck momentum almost makes it too short to be the closer for such a gargantuan album, but then again, that’s just a perfect example of how The Locust handle chaos. With more chaos.
“Fake Teeth” – Swing Kids
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“A Day at the Racist” – Deaf Club
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“Seizure and Desist + Church of the Motherfuckers” – Dead Cross
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“Pissing off in the Rolex of your dreams” – Holy Molar
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“Scraper” – Head Wound City
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“Modern Ball” – Retox
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