Review: Municipal Waste - The Fatal Feast

 Since their 2001 conception, Virginia's Municipal Waste have been a band with one main mission statement: shred. As a result, they've found themselves one of the most successful classic thrash revivalists, playing for thrills and singing songs of partying, getting drunk and mutant attacks with such classics as Drunk As Shit, The Thrashin' of the Christ and Headbanger Face Rip. With this heightened level of musical sophistication, they've managed to gain tours with the more widely celebrated metal types of At the Gates and Suicidal Tendencies. Clearly, even playing for laughs can get you far sometimes.

 And with their fifth album The Fatal Feast, there's some sense of progression from the past few releases. There's an increase of songs that last over three minutes and there are a few seconds of synthesizers in one or two songs but otherwise, the band are here once more to shred things up like it's 1986.
 The Fatal Feast is jam packed once more with a collection of relentless thrash metal songs that rip out and fly by in the blink of an eye. Tracks like Repossession and New Dead Masters and... every other track on the album strike out in a full-on, in your face assault of full scale thrash that also features influences from more streetwise hardcore bands, which in terms of snarling ferocity are right on par with their predecessors in Anthrax and Nuclear Assault. Jagged, rapid-fire riffs from Ryan Waste are played with much viscousness and are in such frequency across the set of seventeen songs that listeners have no choice but to lose themselves within the shredding party tunes and allowing the band to achieve all that they stand for.
 The roughened production as opposed to the more icy precision based musicianship more sophisticated acts thrive on allows Municipal Waste's more punk based side to emerge as well. And with the vocals of frontman Tony Foresta occasionally resembling a warped battered version of those of The Offspring's Dexter Holland and the guitars on Standards and Practices and Residential Disaster actually creating hooks during their choruses to create fist-pumping thrash anthems, well, it's just obvious that the band have their phaser set on fun for this album.
 So, Municipal Waste pretty much worked out their winning formula a long time ago and there's clearly no sign of them slowing down. They're more of a band for real thrash enthusiasts for whom shredding is the only option. It's heavy on rapid riffs and action. It's everything we've come to expect from Municipal Waste and it's relentless as ever.

Municipal Waste's The Fatal Feast is out now via Nuclear Blast.