Municipal Waste
The Fatal Feast

Municipal waste, or everyday garbage, everyday items discarded by people, that is what this band are calling themselves and that I can conclude in a strangle (I have not misspelled strange here) formed sentence. They are a band that has been around for a while and this The Fatal Feast with additional title words Waste in Space is their fifth studio album. Crossover thrash with a light tone is what the word around is saying and with a glance at the album cover it is not really that difficult to believe that such a thing is true, it looks like such an album but with a slight hint towards Iron Maiden as well. It is a band I know nothing about but it does not worry me, neither does the many negative comments about the title track that I found on youtube, but then again you have to be a poor excuse of a person to sit around on youtube writing comments on videoclips so their opinions are not really valid anyway.

Crossover thrash is said to be thrash metal with punk influences and that is a rather good description on this band, fast paced, word spewing, aggressive and raw punkish thrash metal is what they can be described as. They also have a lighter tone in their lyrical ramblings and does not seem to be a band striving to be taken seriously and that lends their music suitable for background applications mainly. It is a sixteen (seventeen if you have the vinyl issue or the digipak) track album that plays for 37 minutes during which there are not really a high amount of variation available for you as a listener. All tracks are fast paced and have a raw sound and the vocals are mostly spat out by the singer rather than being sung.

The singer is bad in a good way, the sound is rather poor but still good in some sort of bizarre way. Not an album for active listening as it is simple and straight and can easily get boring in a few short listens and I find myself thinking about this album’s lack of variation for a bit so it is a tad long although not too bad and after ten play throughs I am not overly bored with it anyway. I think it suits well when you are at work, driving, to annoy the neighbours and when counting grains of salt in a big bucket. It does not hold up as well if you just sit down and listen to it, or stand up if that is you preferred way of listening to an album.

Some songs are also better than others, like the second one, Reposession which has a good energetic yet melodic feel to it. Track four is another highlight which is called Unholy Abductor and it is one of those songs where the singer spews out the words in 200 mph and it has a sense of good thrashy energy and rawness to it. I must also add the title track to this albeit the video is not as fun as it could have been but funny enough you could argue. Some tracks are quite indifferent and some of the rest has some good parts but are not brilliant as complete songs but still the overall feel is that this is a good album, it has great energy and great sense of dirty rawness in contrast to most other music today that is more polished than an unguarded penguin nest.

So in the end I can recommend this to anyone who wants a raw, funny album to play when driving for almost 40 minutes or to have when inviting home friends for whatever you invite friends home (that is something I never do so I have no clue). Generally it is just a quite good album, nothing fantastic or earth shattering but good nonetheless.