The prolific punk rockers of Retox prefer to keep their songs short

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      Describing Justin Pearson as prolific is something of an understatement. Since he first set foot on a stage in the early ’90s, the 38-year-old San Diegan has been a member of more than a dozen bands, including Struggle, Swing Kids, Some Girls, and the Locust. Pearson is currently touring with Retox, whose most recent album, YPLL, puts his signature wounded-animal howl over the relentless assault of guitarist Michael Crain, bassist Thor Dickey, and drummer Brian Evans.

      Reached on the road in Philadelphia, a road-weary but amiable Pearson allows that Retox is essentially a straight-ahead, fist-to-the-gut hardcore act, as opposed to the art-damaged weirdo noise of the Locust, which is the longest-running and arguably best-known of all of his projects.

      “With the Locust, there’s no one singer; there’s three singers,” he tells the Straight. “There’s a bunch of weird electronic stuff happening—there’s the modular synth, there’s the Moog Voyager, and then Bobby [Bray] and I both have tons of effects, so you can’t really pick out ‘Oh, that’s the keyboard’ or ‘That’s the bass’ or ‘That’s the guitar.’ Everything just sounds weird, you know. So I think with Retox it’s a little more standard. There’s one singer, there’s one guitar player—who has a good amount of effects, so that anything weird you can kind of attribute it to the guitar—and there’s not the confusion of a synthesizer or something. And of course the bass is pretty straightforward as well. There’s obviously going to be similarities, but there’s a lot of differences as well.”

      YPLL whips by at the breakneck pace of 12 tracks in 22 minutes. That leaves little time for the listener to absorb the angular violence of “Don’t Fall in Love With Yourself” or the hyperdrive shredding of “Biological Process of Politics” before the next sonic bomb detonates. The album’s centrepiece is “Soviet Reunion”, which starts with a lone guitar but builds to a skull-crushing riff over the course of a relatively luxurious three minutes and 21 seconds. Most of the tracks, however, clock in at under two minutes. Rick Wakeman, eat your heart out!

      “I remember when I was a little kid growing up and I got a Sore Throat album, and it had 101 songs on it,” Pearson recalls fondly. “A lot of bands, like Napalm Death and stuff, did that early, early, early on. A lot of the people in the Locust and Retox came from that era of music, growing up with short grindcore songs or whatever. Hardcore songs. And then we just kind of tweaked it a little bit and made it what it is. But I certainly don’t think it’s a new thing that we’ve discovered, obviously. It’s been there for decades.”

      Pearson adds that, in keeping things short, Retox is sparing its fans from that dreaded scourge of heavy music: ear fatigue. “It’s kind of like when you listen to black metal and there’s a blast beat for three minutes and there’s no real changes; you’re just like, ‘Fuck, this is tiring,’ ” he says. “By default, when you play aggressive music, you lose certain elements of dynamic, and so therefore shorter pieces make more sense and are more digestible.”

      Retox’s songs are actually pulse-quickening masterworks, punk-rock symphonies writ in miniature. To call them merely “digestible” would be an understatement, on par with describing Pearson as “prolific”.

      Retox opens for the Dillinger Escape Plan at the Rickshaw Theatre on Friday (April 18).

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