The Small, Strange Cult of Crazy & The Brains

Photos by Amanda Hatfield

Crazy & The Brains’ record release show starts the way most other punk shows you’ve been to start. Lots of Hey babe, hold my coat. I’m going up front and it might get nuts. And it does. The band opens with a song about ice cream that’s actually about fucking and a brave dozen in the crowd claim the area directly in front of the stage as theirs.

But unlike the usual mosh pit of Neanderthals, meatheads, and chongos stomping around in mesh shorts and basketball jerseys, launching their sweaty beefbag bodies from the stage and throwing haymakers and windmill punches at each other’s skulls under a thin guise of some unity bullshit, those up front are mostly women in dresses. And they came, like they do every show, to dance.

“It’s like a drunken Groundhog Day,” one of the women would describe it to me later. Meaning, they all see each other at every one of the band’s shows, they all hear the same songs, they all party the same party. At the risk of sounding like a creepy male onlooker, that consists of bumping butts, serenading each other sexily at incredibly close range, and doing some very dramatic, semi-choreographed dance interpretations of the songs. All while a perimeter of coat rack boyfriends line the area around them.

“This song’s called ‘I’m Rich,’” says frontman Chris Urban to intro a song. “Which is ironic ‘cause we don’t got any fuckin’ money.” He is energetic and bug-eyed as he sings, “What we do on Saturday, oh it don’t matter, hey I’m rich, baby!” At one point, a bearded man comes fingerpointing his way towards the front to sing along, slur-shouting like an asshole and spilling absurd amounts of beer from the plastic cup he’s holding above his head. Like a virus exposed to a strong immune system, he is promptly rejected and expelled from the body.

It’s a refreshing role reversal, really. To cover your ears, you’d think Crazy & The Brains were an all-female group of ultra-feminists. But they’re not. They’re just four dudes from Bayonne, New Jersey who like to party. They play Ramones-style punk and, if I had to pick out one key thing that makes their sound stand out, it’s the fact that they’ve got a member pounding the everloving piss out of a xylophone for every song.

“Punk just got totally macho and very uniform and I think a lot of bands that were considered punk were totally missing the point. Where’s the originality? It was all the same shit. Just dudes beating the shit out of each other,” Urban tells me two weeks later on a night where the band has scheduled two last minute shows at two different venues in two different New York boroughs. “I like some of that stuff too but we wanted to do our own thing. And yeah, for some reason, girls are into it,” he laughs.

Urban is small but lean and says “fuckin’” every two or three words. He’s wearing a black leather jacket covered in metal studs which perfectly accentuates his polka dot pajama pant bottoms. With his trademark sailor hat, which he never seems to take off, and his ridiculously gaudy “gold” chain that he bought for 30 bucks at the Newport Mall, he looks like a longshoreman with a struggling rap career. And talks like Tim Armstrong if he ended up in the Beastie Boys instead of Rancid.

“Some people don’t think we’re a punk band, which… I don’t care. That don’t matter to me,” he shrugs. “And some people like to write us off immediately, like, ‘Oh this is hipster shit.’” But the people who do dig them seem to latch on hard and quick.

Urban is not really sure where his small but rabid cult-like following came from but it’s been slowly growing since the band started four years ago, first making a name for themselves in the anti-folk scene, before moving on to any scene that would have them. And it seems like the more the band finds itself, the more it seems to expand, or at least deepen.

“We’re not gonna change to please other people. The way I talk in the songs is the way I talk in real life,” he says, in an incredibly factual and Jersey accent-laden statement. “I think a lot of music is lame. Everyone’s too scared to say the wrong thing. I like taking the piss out of people and speaking your mind.”

On Good Lord, the band’s new EP—which would have been a full album, but as mentioned, they don’t got any fuckin’ money—there’s a song called “A Vampire Weekend,” which talks some major shit on boat shoe rockers Vampire Weekend, calling them pussy boys and rich motherfuckers.

“That stuff happens all the time in hip-hop and I think it’s awesome,” he says of the song, comparing it to Kendrick Lamar’s verse on Big Sean’s song, “Control,” where Lamar rattles off the name of just about every rapper in the game before saying, “I got love for you all but I’m trying to murder you n—as/ Make sure your core fans never heard of you n—as/ They don’t wanna hear not one more noun or verb from you n—as.”

“He doesn’t necessarily hate them,” explains Urban. “But he’s like, this is my competition so I’m going after them. That’s what I was getting at with the Vampire Weekend song. They’re at the top, they don’t even know who the fuck we are, so it’s kinda funny that we’re even saying anything about them.”

After Crazy & The Brains’ first show of the night, I see a group of women who I recognize from every other time I’ve seen the band. They’re putting their coats on and making their way towards the door. “You all heading to their next show?” I ask them. They are. “Can I ask—what is it about this band that brings you out every single time?” The women look at each other as if they’ve all telepathically agreed upon this answer. One of them responds.

“Honestly? They make music you can dance to. And girls like to dance.” Can’t argue with that.

Dan Ozzi is on Twitter – @danozzi