I’m not about to sit here and tell you I’ve been a fan of, well, anything Tony Ferrera and his band of self-styled hard-partying miscreants has done under the banner of MONOLITHIC…erm, sorry…MUNICIPAL WASTE. To be honest, the whole idea kinda rubs me up the wrong way. Sure, EXODUS had its moments of fun for fun’s sake in the likes of ‘Toxic Waltz’, and don’t even get me started on the never-deserved-to-be-in-the-Big-Four-anyway ANTHRAX, but at least occasionally they’d kick out some decent jams to make up the difference.
Not so with these guys, and I’m not really sure how, nearly 20 years on, MUNICIPAL WASTE (OF TIME) still seems to be going strong, like some shit-fueled Energizer Bunny that just won’t stop banging that party metal drum.
And thus, The Last Rager, a 10+ minute long suckfest guaranteed to make the Hot Topic Heshers crack open their White Claws, fire up their vape pens to “blow major cloud”, and bore the ever-loving shit out of the rest of us. The main “riff” in ‘Wave Of Death’ would’ve been overdone in ’86, while ‘Car Nivore (Street Meat)’ makes even the crappy songs from DEATH ANGEL’s sophomore slumpfest Frolic Through The Park sound like CYNIC by comparison.
You can start pissing and moaning about how I just “don’t like fun” or something, and you’re mostly right; however, S.O.D. / M.O.D. were brilliant at times, and took the piss out of, oh, everyone under the sun. What’s on offer here, though, is just simply bad at best, and a 4-lb ball of fecal matter shot from the anal cannon of nowadays “retro” thrash at worst.
With any luck, The Last Rager will be exactly that.
Review By: Lord Randall
MUNICIPAL WASTE
The Last Rager
Nuclear Blast
– 12 / 6