Brevity is at the heart of punk’s feral ideology — get in, get out, and fuck everyone who’s not on board for the ride. The genre’s multiple layers of aesthetics provide plenty of opportunity for bands to adhere to or break away from this core tenet. Occasionally, Dead Kennedys go long (“Chickenshit Conformist”) and sometimes Circle Jerks barely break the half-minute mark (“Deny Everything”), but their shared obsession with whiplash rhythms and scorched melodies marks them as essential punk touchstones. Portland’s Lab Rat skew toward the latter, ripping through songs and engaging in a full-out assault that never lets you stop to catch your breath or to calm the adrenaline pumping through your body.
In just nine songs (and spanning just 13 minutes), Lab Rat’s self-titled debut rails against social contracts, political machinations, and the inevitable holocaust to come should people keep mindlessly marching to their collective doom. It’s vicious, and you can feel the heat on your face after its conclusion, along with a blooming awareness of just how terrible humanity can be. These aren’t new revelations or novel topics for discussions in punk music, it’s the genre’s bread and butter: aggressive observation of the breakdown of society and the proliferation of war and the disregard for those who survive on the periphery of civilization.
Album opener “Abomination” is a blast of sonic napalm, a statement of intent from a band who can’t simply sit back and watch the world burn to ash. They may not be able to stop our inevitable decline, but they can document the struggle to save those who realize that the end is quickly approaching. But you can’t just pummel people relentless over the head; there must be something that makes the message stick. And in the case of Lab Rat, that something is ridiculously catchy grooves delivered via atomic riffs and punk apoplectics. “Death of Hope” and Sign of the Times” further detail the forthcoming apocalypse, with guitars being dismembered while voices are strangled in the shadows.
Distortion is laid like a comforting blanket across everything here, enveloping the thudding rhythmic progression of “The Lab” and acting as background decoration on “Psychic Damage”. These songs churn and swallow small sections of the earth, calling forth bolts of lightning to purge the world of tyrannical intent.
Lab Rat close out the album with “Failed Society”, which opens with a quote from political scientist Michael Parenti before devolving into a mass of writhing guitars and mutating percussion. The beat bounds around the track, circling the other instruments like a vulture, ready to settle in for a meal on the decaying remains of the music. The band deliver their message in exponential amplitude, riffs as tall and jagged as Mount Everest, shredding their souls in the hope that they can provide illumination for just one more person.
