Album review: Municipal Waste – Electrified Brain

Municipal Waste is gonna fuck you up! That’s a promise as valid today as it was when the beer-swilling Richmond mob first blasted into the crossover thrash revival two decades ago. This is a band who have made an art out of partying. They’ve got a bottomless back-catalogue of bangers that might just be the closest sensory experience to that of drunkenly falling down a flight of stairs. Their legendary live shows are the kind of place where you can find yourself slam-dunked into a trash-can, with little option but to throw the horns and get gleefully carried away.

Arriving five years after spanking sixth album Slime And Punishment, fans might be concerned that Electrified Brain is sound of them finally losing momentum. They needn’t fret. From that glorious artwork depicting a mosher’s skull being impaled/exploded by a custom Flying V to each of the 14 tracks contained within, this feels like the product of Municipal Waste growing more and more wound up over the ludicrous last few years rather than any kind of slowing down.

High-voltage nuggets like Demoralizer and Last Crawl might seem like they’re hanging by a thread, but they’re actually custom-tooled to provoke maximum mosh carnage. High Speed Steel and Thermonuclear Protection inject a sense of sweeping high drama to the pedal-to-the-metal formula. The brilliantly-titled Grave Dive feels like a cheeky promise that instruments and beverage cans will need to be prised from Tony Foresta and the lads’ cold, dead hands.

Of course, there’s fuck all revolutionary on show here. Those looking for any kind of genre-reinventing revelation – or, indeed, even the slightest subtlety – need not apply. But for those of us after a band who still kill the old way, Municipal Waste remain the ultimate soundtrack for smashing cans and banging heads.

Verdict: 4/5

For fans of: Iron Reagan, Gama Bomb, Toxic Holocaust

Electrified Brain is out on July 1 via Nuclear Blast