Exclude Gradle @LargeTest

I am trying to run unit test on a separate task from the UI tests that I have within the integration tests in Android Studio, unfortunately I have to use

apply plugin: 'com.android.application'

in the build.gradle file so I cannot add the custom test tasks as far as I can tell. Since the UI tests are tagged as "@Test" and extend InstrumentationTestCase they get run whenever

gradle connectedCheck

is called which is not needed, instead I want one gradle command to run UI tests and one to run unit tests. I figured that I would be able to leverage tagging the UI tests as LargeTests but have not been able to complete a gradle task that can do this. I am not able to use the "test" task in the build.gradle since we are using the com.android.application plugin, and advice?

Thanks