The Locust Offers Up a Cathartic Musical Mutiny

San Diego's the Locust are the apocalypse of music. They are the end of the metal and punk worlds, where insects raised on nuclear waste swarm large cities and chew through steel, concrete, flesh and bone in a matter of minutes and then commit that rampage to vinyl. They are the sound of instruments imploding and crushing, angry cries that are indecipherable to human ears. They are the brilliant side of grindcore, a genre that moves like termites through heavy music, shaving sonic movements down to their tiniest flecks of flammable substance. And they do all this within the cramped space of songs that rarely last more than 60 seconds a pop.

The band is going on its fifth year, with countless new minions slavishly buying up all its insect belt buckles and earlier records (The Locust, their first album, sold out 2000 copies the first week of its release) and packing in to see the act's intense live shows. Onstage, the Locust wear black fuzzy vests and bugged-out Mad Max sunglasses, tersely bantering with the crowd (sample: "Media assholes and regular people, this is how it is to be a virgin") before fracturing and reforming sonic insanity at whiplash speed.

Flight of the Wounded Locust is the group's newest EP, and the 11 rapid-fire songs contain everything Locust culters will never understand but have come to worship nonetheless. The Roland keyboards sound like they're getting slammed by some coked-up Frankenstein on loan from a science fiction film of the future. The guitars are buzzsaws cutting through Kryptonite. The vocals are a flurry of bloodcurdling rage and demon whispers rising up from the supernatural fires of hell. Calm lasts only a moment, but the loops of chemically imbalanced spasms are even shorter. The song titles are jumbled pieces of thoughts strung together by a thread of smart-aleck humor: "Gluing Carpet to Your Genitals Does Not Make You a Cantaloupe," "Turning Your Merchandise into a Ripped Wall of Mini-Abs," "Get Off the Cross the Wood Is Needed," and my favorite, "Spitting in the Face of Fools as a Source of Nutrition."

This music is suffocating, antisocial and combative, slashing through silence and creating a landfill of wreckage in its wake. But listening to it is like craning your neck as you pass the 15-car pileup on the freeway?it's such a violent mess you couldn't avert your eyes if you tried. And in this era when even punks are starting to sound a little homogenous (lemme guess, your songs are about fucking, getting fucked up and telling everyone to fuck off), the Locust blast out of Southern California flying the real middle finger of defiance. Flight of the Wounded Locust is the just the kind of musical mutiny we need to purge all the processed bullshit. So when this swarm lands, it's best just to pray for it to take you to its leader.