The first thirteen tracks on Rats & Cats, the newest full length from Fort Collins CO’s Lounge Drugs, clock in at just over twenty-six minutes. For you math heads out there, that’s right – an average of two minutes per song. The brevity is intentional: a constraint the multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Jay LeCavalier self-imposed after a number of projects with long, progressive, overlapping song structures. The result is a steady barrage of blissed out fuzz riffs and psychedelic textures.

Oddly, splitting impulses into their essence and recording them as separate pieces doesn’t result in a wholly different listening experience as listing to a single song that evolves through multiple parts with different dynamics and time signatures. With songs so brief the listening experience remains one of being washed over by a continuous stream of music rather than a collection of distinct songs.

That said, it’s a lot simpler to identify killer segments when each part has its own track listing. For example, opener “your brain,” title track “rats & cats,” and most of the under two-minute blitzes are head nodding crushers. “Your mind belongs to me” rollicks through a “I’m not your Stepping Stone” like surf rock,  while the mellower “aquarius” and “kodai” provide nice respites from the all-out rock of the rest of the album.

Despite plentiful differences from one song to the next, the sonic pallet remains relatively consistent. Fuzzy, reverbed-out guitars, delay-drenched vocals, sturdy bass, and a blasted out drum sound combine for a style halfway between Ty Segall’s bombastic songcraft and Black Moth Super Rainbow’s trancelike psychedelic synth rock. The songs are consistently well crafted, delightfully performed, and delivered in a pleasingly retro hifi. Overall, Lounge Drugs fit nicely into and hold up against titans of the neopsych canon (King Gizz, Oh Sees, Unknown Mortal Orchestra, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, the aforementioned Ty Segall etc.).

Then there’s the fourteenth track, “stare into your fear, sunrise.” This seventeen-minute composition does the precise opposite of the rest of the record, evolving and slipping through a number of tempos and dynamics, building and resting, shifting gears, all while noodling over a relatively steady single-note progression. Sometimes psych rock transports your mind with overstimulation; at others it lulls you into an otherworldly headspace through trancelike repetition. While it’s a curious decision to abandon the gambit of concise bangers that defines the first half of Rats & Cats, it’s pretty impressive how Lounge Drugs excels at both approaches on the same album.