Cerebral Ballzy tick all of the punk boxes. They have a less than P.C. Name, their album is adorned with inked black and white art, they're from Brooklyn and they play music at a thousand miles per hour. Their self-titled debut is a love letter to the speed metal and hardcore punk of the 1980's, the sort made by Black Flag and Bad Brains, and almost entirely extinct these days. The music on this album is a world apart from the homogenised music that is presented as punk nowadays. There are no big budget videos, no photo calls of the band looking introspective hanging out on a roof-garden somewhere because Cerebral Ballzy are all about their music. There's little sophistication here, at just over 19 minutes the album seems to end just as soon as you start getting used to it.
Frontman Honor Titus isn't trying to convey any grand message in his lyrics but then again, what would you expect to learn from song titles like Junkie For Her, Drug Myself Dumb or Puke Song? That's not said to disparage Cerebral Ballzy in any way - quite the opposite - because this is an album which refuses to give in to convention. "I don't wanna be like them, I refuse to be like them", screams Titus in On The Run. That, in a nutshell, describes them better than any review could.
