Lesson one in how to keep furious grindcore interesting for 41 minutes: make it less furious and add more variety. Labrat is Great Britain’s answer to Converge and OLD. Remember OLD? Fantastically absurd and bizarre with a huge amount of humour. A little like Spazztic Blurr on acid or something in that corner of the musical spectrum. Labrat have great musical ideas that from time to time connect to the mathematical jazzy grindcore that bands like Dillinger Escape Plan let slip from their fingers but add a dose of furiousness and chaos to their songs that is so typical for oldfashioned late 80s grindcore. Rap it all up with song titles like ‘Clint Eastwood Is Very Hard, Innit’ and ‘Phuelled by Farmiceuticals’ and you know the deal. In this case ridiculously fast metal with terrorising vocals sung by singer Rob with both antagonizing high screams and bottom deep grunts combined with mid- and uptempo groovers.

And they don’t choose the easy road out of Dodge. Drummer Nathan hits some serious skins and cymbals, riddled with dissonant and testosterone riffs. Don’t expect a 10 song blastarama, because the variety of their sound makes ‘Ruining it for everyone’ a keeper for Converge fans, OLD fans and Napalm Death fans. If you’re a little tired of the complicated mathematical neo extreme grind blablabla which is so intensely popular these days, you must check out Labrat because in the end it’s exactly like it`s written in the press-release: Labrat are as subtle as a neon sign.