Safety Second, Body Last

VINYL FORMAT. The Locust's beauty has always come in finesse and intricacy thirty seconds of pitiless hurricane squall. Epic, labyrinthine guitar licks deconstructed, flipped ass-backwards, and compressed into two-second-long baby snake squiggles, dainty ticka-ticka-tickas of hummingbird cymbal taps, followed by 80 hammer smacks squeezed into a heartbeat. But just as America has changed since The Locust hatched back in '95, so it goes with their sound. The band's 2003 anti-debut, Plague Soundscapes, took it's half-minute killzaps and added a gurgling, hissing swamp of electronics, and their new one, Ipecac's Safety Second, Body Last produced by Alex Newport goes even further.