With the glut of throwback retro-Thrash acts seeking to re-capture the 80s with varying degrees of success, leave it to a bunch of old farts (like yours truly) to succeed in a way few of these youngsters are capable of. Sure, plenty of respectable acts these days mix their trashcan punch from all the right bottles: Speed Metal, politics, moronic humour, pointy but somewhat shitty logos; but leave it to some oldsters who were there to seize on sounds that few revivalists lock on to.

Enter CEREBRAL FIX with "Disaster Of Reality", their first release in 24 years. The element of authenticity they absolutely nail though is 'sloppiness'. Wait, hear me out...thrashers these days all pray to the altar of the speedy riff, and that's great, but what's lost in the shuffle is that for every NUCLEAR ASSAULT or D.R.I. there were plenty of bands from the early Thrash days (before the term "crossover" had ever been uttered) who took a more ham-fisted approach to metallizing Punk Rock. Cerebral Fix is like a blast straight from 1986; warts, troglodytic riffage, production that sounds like it's already a couple of boombox dupes old - the works!

Birmingham, England's Cerebral Fix burst forth with their debut, "Life Sucks...And Then You Die" in 1988, well past when US Thrashers were already refining their craft and the Punkier proponents were fully crossing over into distinctly Metallic sounds. UK Thrash and crossover never caught fire quite like German, for example, though many British Thrashers were sowing the seeds of Grindcore...but that's another story. If there's a notable contemporary for CEREBRAL FIX it might be ACID REIGN; if you can imagine the latter band's "Moshkinstein" dirtied up with a pronounced Discharge edge and death-tinged vocals, you've got a solid idea of where their sound lives.

By the time they suspended activities (following their fourth album "Death Erotica") they'd shown a trend towards tighter riffing, a decidedly more metallic approach and a notably artful gravitas. That album and its predecessor "Bastards" saw them touring with heavy-hitters and featuring guest appearances by members of NAPALM DEATH and even some vocals by Blaze Bayley. For this record, sole original member Gregg Fellows curiously opted to return to fundamentals, with some grimy Proto-Thrash that lands squarely on the Punkier side of the line.

This is a super-fun release that conjures up memories of so many twelfth-generation dupes that were traded through the back-pages of magazines. Once your ears adjust to the crowded mix - the kick drum often forces the guitars to drop out, for example - you're treated to a raucous romp through nostalgia from a period you likely didn't witness! It's all here, a song about moshing ("Mosh Injury"), a song about skateboarding, or rather, not being able to skate because you're too goddamn old ("Skate Fear"), even a paean to Thrash itself, à la Arthur Conley's "Sweet Soul Music" where they name-check a bunch of bands ("Felted Cross")! Also, peppered throughout are brash political screeds about war and the environment.

Musically, the riffs are rudimentary but always catchy. The closer is a novelty electronic Dub-Reggae pastiche that's actually pretty rad, and has the cleanest production on the album. This album feels like that tape you'd bring to the half-pipe, eject that worn-out copy of  "4 Of A Kind" and be all like "DUDES! Check THIS shit out!"

Now a sad but fitting addendum to this review: as of a posting on their Facebook page just days ago, Cerebral Fix are no more. Again. Is it a great loss to the world of music? Well, no. Is this a stellar piece of crucial metal? Not really...as my number score will have to recognise. In the grand scheme of things, this record wasn't going to end up on anyone's year-end lists, and perhaps this band even deserves to be relegated to footnote status. Yet it sure is nice to be reminded of those days when Metal dudes tuned into what that weird spiky-haired kid was listening to, and the mohawk-and-combat-boots set discovered practicing and palm-mutes.