The Locust are interviewed by the ASU Web Devil

It's like drinking gasoline and then trying to fly an airplane.

At least, that's how Gabe Serbian, drummer for punk group The Locust, describes the calamitous sounds that he and his band mates produce.

Having formed from the leftovers of two other San Diego bands back in 1995, The Locust is now comprised of Serbian, Justin Pearson, Joseph Karam and Robert Bray. The band claims no lead singer, and at live shows it habitually lines all its members up front. They also have no name for the tour they are now on, but the band will, however, promote the June release of its new album "Plague Soundscapes" with a tour starting in July.

Until then, local fans can absorb The Locust's scourge of cacophonous notes at the Mason Jar on Monday night.

And what a cacophony their music is. It is a screeching and brutal wall of sound that grates on the listener's ears. The songs may be short, but they pack a potent punch. It's no wonder they have been categorized as "power violence" in the past. However, the band disagrees with this label.

"I don't think there is a section you could put us in," Serbian says in a phone interview, pointing out that once one classifies a band's style, the sound is dead. "We just make it sound intense and interesting. What comes out [is] fucked-up sounds."

"We're trying to musically get in people's faces. We don't try to be [controversial]," Serbian says.

Whether they try or not, turbulence in some form usually shakes up their shows.

As the band was setting up for a concert in Omaha, Neb., on Friday, says Serbian, a "skinhead" decided to convey his distaste for the band's costumes - which make the band look like "reptilian insect humanoids" - by flicking a cigarette at the drummer and calling the rest of the band "fags."

While The Locust has a reputation for chaotic, energetic and, occasionally, violent shows, Serbian doesn't feel that the band is an instigator, nor that its metal-punk leanings warrant violent behavior such as fighting and starting fires, which have both happened at previous shows.

"[Violent people] are around because they're attracted to extreme music, [but] who wants to hang around a bunch of assholes?" Serbian says.

He adds that the band would, optimally, like everyone to simply have a good time and dance. However, he says people will inevitably interpret The Locust's music emotionally and physically. In the hands of hormonally-unbalanced youth, this can be a dangerous combination.

"It's hard for them to harness what they're feeling," he says.

Bray, the band's guitarist, has a different spin on the intentions of The Locust.

"We're trying to document the last moments of existence."

When asked why he feels the end of our society is imminent, Bray bristles. One could almost hear tiny wings flapping.

"Why don't you ask yourself that?" he counters, lobbying a defiant and proverbial tennis ball onto the court. "It's pretty apparent."

Bray, who then giggles like a 15-year-old girl in love, explains his assertion. "It's 2003: Humans are about to die, World War III is probably about to start," he says.

Despite the ominous undertones, Bray is reticent to apply this insight to a message behind the band's music. "I don't think that we're trying to do anything," Bray says. "We're trying to express what we feel at the most subconscious level possible, and get into dormant parts of the mind waiting to be activated."

Bray says that most of the band's inspiration comes from non-musical influences - mainly from shapes, like squares, triangles and circles.

"These objects come to us, mostly in dreams. [They represent] the end of the world, a smooth abyss of floating non-objects [and] creatures [that look] like squares," Bray says.

While the name of the group did not come to them in a dream, the band's moniker is a point of interest. In conjunction with the biblical reference to a plague of locusts and Bray's apocalyptic theories, Serbian explains that the piercing sounds The Locust's harsh music tends to make is similar to the sound of a dissonant horde of insects.

"One locust doesn't make much noise," he says. "We're like a little swarm when we're all together."

Reach the reporter at deborah.berman@asu.edu.

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