Blast from the past albums #8: MUNICIPAL WASTE - Massive Aggressive (2009, Earache)

In this series of posts I'll discuss an album I picked up as a teenager or in my early 20s and haven't listened to in a very long time.

My relationship with Municipal Waste is pretty simple. I like them, find them to be hellish fun on stage (they never disappoint live - I've seen them a handful of times over the years), but I've never had much interest in actually collecting their albums. In fact, Massive Aggressive was the first one I ever picked up. I bought it back in 2009 when it was first released, and since then the only other Municipal Waste album I've bought is 2012 The Fatal Feast. It's not that I find their albums are weak per se, I just never felt the urge to buy more of them. And it has nothing to do with the fact they're a thrash/crossover metal band - for example, a lot of Hirax's albums are made up of similarly short bursts of crazy thrash (minus the humour) and I own plenty of their releases. I guess MW are just a band I like, but don't love!

Anyhow, I'm listening to Massive Aggressive again for the first time in fuck knows how many years, and I'm digging it right now. The songs are kind of hard to distinguish from one another - other than the stupidly catchy 'Mech-Cannibal' and maybe the punky mania of 'Media Skeptic', this album sort of meshes together as one adrenaline-pumping, sweaty mess of lyrically humorous, comic book-like thrash metal with hardcore punk tendencies. Well, I guess you could say that's crossover thrash in a nutshell? Whatever! The fact the songs all blend together isn't really an issue. There's 13 of them, which sounds like a lot, but the entire album only lasts 28 minutes anyway. Other than the final track, 'Acid Sentence', not 1 of them lasts 3 minutes. One-trick pony albums/bands like this can be excused for this if the music is actually decent, which it is. Municipal Waste aren't going to set your world alight with this record, but if you have similar music tastes to me then you're probably gonna enjoy it too. Which is funny, because on Metal Archives this is the lowest rated MW album with an overall rating of just 55% from 9 reviews. Not that Metal Archives is the definitive place for a general consensus (just look at some of those low-scoring reviews of classics like Master of Puppets or Vulgar Display of Power...), but I find their average review scores to be pretty reliable for most albums outside the really popular ones. I guess the fact I never sank my teeth into Municipal Waste's discography means I have little to compare Massive Aggressive to (apart from The Fatal Feast and a few songs I know from The Art of Partying that is). I've seen this band live several times, and this album sounds just like the stuff they played on stage, therefore it sounds pretty good to my ears!

Aye, the songs are mostly fast and frantic with the odd mid-tempo number (the title track) or old-school style breakdown riffs within them. It's really quite impressive just how many thrashy riffs they've crammed into these short songs, and even if it's difficult to remember them all, they certainly get my adrenaline pumping. I've always thought Tony Foresta's vocals are pretty average overall; he sounds like he's straining a lot the time, but he does at least suit the nature of the music. So I can at least give the vocals a pass, even if I find the rest of the band perform at a noticeably higher level. The production is mostly decent, although I do think the guitar tones are a little on the lighter side. They have kind of a soft distortion/overdrive sound, if that makes any sense?! Like they were trying too hard to replicate '80s guitar tones - but it just doesn't give the songs the balls they could have deserved. Maybe I'm talking absolute bollocks, but there's something that's always never really settled with me in this department. Nowhere near enough to put me off the record, but enough for me to notice. That said, I do like the sound of the drums. They sound human, as daft as that sounds.

What Massive Aggressive seems to remind me most of, is Suicidal Tendencies' 1987 album, Join the Army. Not vocally of course, because Foresta sounds nothing like Mike Muir. But the intensity of the songs, the riffs and overall tongue-in-cheek attitude of the lyrics always makes me want to listen to that classic ST record straight after. Oh, by the way - I think Join the Army is 1000x stronger than Massive Aggressive. But for what it's worth, the fact Municipal Waste successfully manage to remind me of another album I love does at least put a smile on my face. And for that reason I still think Massive Aggressive is a good time overall. I don't think my opinion of it has changed much since I first bought it back in 2009 - I still have no urge to get on Ebay right now and start seeking out more of their stuff, but at the very least it scratches the crossover thrash itch for me.

In the picture is my special edition box set. In it comes the CD jewel case, a patch that was sewed onto my battle jacket back in 2009, some pin badges and a sweatband that I've lost. 
Adam's rating: 7/10