The Garage, London
9 April 2004
It’s good to know Thrash is alive and well and kicking up a stir, and tonight The Garage is graced with a queue down the street and eventually with a venue full of The Kids, Heavy Metal or otherwise, almost visibly churning with excitement at the prospect of a night of speedy percussion and throaty vocals. Ephel Duath provide more of the former than the latter, springing with vigorous post-Primus jazzcore energy. Their sound is taut and polished, ripping out the sixpence-turns at the point where virtuosity and gleeful noise interesct. Whatever they do – and it’s a phenomenon of the style, not really a fault per se – everything sounds progged up and hence more than a little noodly: but the saving grace is that one song is over quickly and another begun in the whirlwind blur of extraspeed jazz.
Beecher hold to the traditional Hardcore ethic of fast and guttural being good: guitar, bass drums, ladled out with gusto with the vocals imploring and retching for something indistinct yet palpably energetic, discontented. They get the job done with a will, shuddering and contorting both physically and musically through a set which prepares the ground ably for the main attraction with brutally effective doses of condensed hyperspeedmetalgrindcorethrash,all accomplished at great volume and with suitable swiftness. What an attraction The Locust are too: four insectoids in white costumes complete with gigantic gauze eyes and a buzzing Moog to s(t)imulate the sound of a prairie swarm hervesting everything in range. As with their namesakes, it is almost futile to ask what The Locust’s songs are about, or what the words are, when placed in the eye of the raging bursts of frenetic activity onstage. The only practicable response is to be swept up on the enveloping rush of tingly oscillator mayhem and the grumbling undertow of the furious rhythm section, all squalled into agitated activy by the guitar.
What words there are blur into a maelstrom of super-short activty, with longer sweeps across the board into threatening synthsizer texture which mark out areas for recuperation and for the next ear-spreading onslaught. It’s not that The Locust are so much heavy as dense, packing irate alien(ated) fury into their music and live presence with so much conviction that it’s hard to remember that underneath the blank staring hoods are entities which are wholly human. Such is the power of suspended disbelief that even the necessary removal of a shirt by the drummer to prevent inevitable overheating in the sweatbath onstage doesn’t detract from the illusion of otherness that much. The Locust are simply phenomenal, in many senses of the word, providing a glimpse into the aural pathways of the hive mind while making a gloriously sinister racket in the process which places their already extreme music on record in the proper live context of tightly-wound, cathartic noise.
-Linus Tossio-
