Virginia thrash/crossover goofballs MUNICIPAL WASTE have been plying their trade for over two decades, gaining and losing fans, a group of die-hards who love everything this crew breathes, burps or farts in tow, and doing – quite frankly – nothing to my ears and eyes but put a clown face on metal. Now, don’t get me wrong, it’s not that Tony Foresta & co. aren’t talented, but their output has always seemed, well, contrived. I’m also looking at you, Joel Grind, but that’s for another time.
Still and all, I seem beholden to give each album a chance – at least one – to see if things have improved. At 14 songs in 33 minutes, MW has never been much for sticking around once the initial Skeleton(witch) of the song has been strung together, and the same holds true throughout Electrified Brain. The title track shows Foresta at his most convincing in years, and Dave Witte has always been a monster behind the kit in any outfit, as evidenced in ‘Demoralizer’ and ‘The Bite’. He could be easily phoning his parts in, but it doesn’t sound like it, not at all, and ‘High Speed Steel’, the sixth track here, is the furthest I’ve gotten into a MW album ever without dreading the rest, so that has to count for something, right?
And there it is. There. It. Is. ‘Blood Vessel – Boat Jail’ sounds composed of equal parts DIAMOND HEAD’s ‘Am I Evil’ and DEATH ANGEL’s ‘Road Mutants’, so a miserable fail. ‘Crank The Heat’ falls so hard the next two songs just lie in a trash-heap of unoriginality, not that that’s ever been a concern for MUNICIPAL WASTE anyhow.
Injecting a bit of true crossover, ‘Putting On Errors’ is still far too little far too late, and that’s where we’re going to leave Electrified Brain. You almost suckered me in, boys, I’ll give ya that. Yet here I am, yet once more, at the end of a half-hour thinking of a thousand ways I could’ve spent my time other than tossed-off, half-hearted gimmick-ridden new school playing at old school.
Review By: Lord Randall
MUNICIPAL WASTE
Electrified Brain
Nuclear Blast
1 / 6