Richmond, Virginia's Municipal Waste aren't fucking around anymore. Accredited with spawning the party metal genre, a pairing of crossover metal with tongue-in-cheek songs about killer sharks and food fights, the band's fourth effort Massive Aggressive is a complete about-face from their own scene. Bleaker and more aggressive, it's time to face a different sort of Waste.
"[The party metal scene] started getting stale," sighs vocalist Tony "Guardrail" Foresta (joined by guitarist Ryan Waste, bassist Philip "Land Phil" Hall and drummer Dave Witte). "There are too many cooks in that kitchen. It was getting boring - time to get the fuck out. [It] gets old when everyone's telling the same joke, so we got heavier, darker. The last album, we stuck with the whole party scene, which was a good idea at the time. It got us a lot of attention. With this album though, everybody knew we had to branch out more and be more creative. We had to do something different."
While it seems strange that the goofiness is gone, Massive Aggressive proves them right. Its 13 tracks are a powerhouse of riffs, attitude and thunder, a welcome advance from their previous facetiousness. Foresta justifiably compares it to another band's foray from juvenility to raw power.
"[Massive Aggressive] is kind of like when the Misfits did Earth A.D. All of their albums before it were campy and sing song-y. When Earth A.D. came out, it kicked everyone's ass. People didn't know what to do with it. That's what we're doing: we were stuck in the same situation where people think we're a campy band but we care about what we're doing. We still have fun live but we wanted to punch our way out of [that assumption] instead of riding the same gimmick yet again."
"[The party metal scene] started getting stale," sighs vocalist Tony "Guardrail" Foresta (joined by guitarist Ryan Waste, bassist Philip "Land Phil" Hall and drummer Dave Witte). "There are too many cooks in that kitchen. It was getting boring - time to get the fuck out. [It] gets old when everyone's telling the same joke, so we got heavier, darker. The last album, we stuck with the whole party scene, which was a good idea at the time. It got us a lot of attention. With this album though, everybody knew we had to branch out more and be more creative. We had to do something different."
While it seems strange that the goofiness is gone, Massive Aggressive proves them right. Its 13 tracks are a powerhouse of riffs, attitude and thunder, a welcome advance from their previous facetiousness. Foresta justifiably compares it to another band's foray from juvenility to raw power.
"[Massive Aggressive] is kind of like when the Misfits did Earth A.D. All of their albums before it were campy and sing song-y. When Earth A.D. came out, it kicked everyone's ass. People didn't know what to do with it. That's what we're doing: we were stuck in the same situation where people think we're a campy band but we care about what we're doing. We still have fun live but we wanted to punch our way out of [that assumption] instead of riding the same gimmick yet again."
