Cerebral Ballzy’s debut album is over in a good deal less than half an hour. Would that American R&B and hip-hop bands took a cue here rather than filling their CDs with 80 minutes of skits and filler, as if that offered more value for money. Not that Cerebral Ballzy are an American R&B or hip-hop outfit. They are, instead, a New York hardcore punk quintet whose name is designed to make anyone who hears it ask, “Who on earth is this?”
Unlike some of their peers – notably the wonderful Deathset – Cerebral Ballzy make no attempt to update raw ballistic walls of guitar with new technology and tricks. Their sound is somewhere between “In a Rut”-era Ruts, The Dead Kennedys and skate punks such as Suicidal Tendencies. The good news is that it’s a livid rush of noise, passionate and revolving around slivers of tune rather than metal riffs or angular avant-garde cacophony.
As is de rigueur with this sort of music, it’s nigh on impossible to hear what’s being sung, with frontman Honor Titus deliberately drawling, slurring and sneering his way through everything. However, the CD sleeve, a pastiche of old photocopied black-and-white punk fanzines, contains the lyrics, and the songs turn out to be a mixture of Ramones-style street-level social observation – “Insufficient Fare” and “Junkie for Her” – and general goonishness, notably on “Puke Song” (“Brains all askew/ Got a gut of old brew… I’m gonna fucking puke”).
This, then, isn’t about beard-stroking and lyric consideration; it’s about pogoing around a stinking micro-venue filled with a gut full of the aforementioned “brew”. Nothing much new going on, but on its own terms it succeeds and is exhilarating.
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