8

Old Skool

This is 80's style thrash so to fully appreciate this album you will need to be wearing the following: Baseball boots, preferably white and half laced. Knee length pants, any colour will do, you can even get away with bright orange ones with little sharks printed on them no one will care. Most t-shirts are fine but a baggy one with an American college print on the front is a good option. Then to top it off you'll need a baseball cap worn backwards.

Not only will you need to look the part, you'll also need to know the dances, there's the slamming into each other until someone gets an elbow in the eye dance, the standing legs apart and headbanging so large your head almost reached the floor between your feet dance and the ever popular running skip in a large circle whilst holding your hands clasped behind your back and bobbing up and down out of time to the music dance. Be warned the last one takes a bit of practice and if you should collide with someone remember to get your hands back round to the front before hitting the floor with your face.

Municipal waste are a thrash metal band that seems to have been released from a time capsule, even their name follows in the tradition of bands of old like Acid reign, Anthrax and Overkill. Now I'm not as stupid as I look and I do realise that these guys are not taking life seriously, they have cartoon artwork on their album cover featuring zombie party dudes drinking toxic waste and song titles like 'Beer pressure' and 'The Inebriator' but I'm still surprised that an album this far out of its time got funded.

Their biggest and most obvious influence is Anthrax, were this twenty years ago people would be expecting them to tour together, they sound like they've been sharing a studio. However the passage of time has not necessarily been kind to 80's style thrash. Party thrash doesn't leave a lot of room for creativity. As a consequence you've got the same vocal 'melody' time after time, a 240 beats per minute drum line and a handful of riffs with some gratuitous solo's chucked in for good measure.

I'm sure it was a lot of fun to record and it probably goes down brilliantly live for anything up to an hour, but after a while it all starts to sound the same, the songs bounce along, the singer shouts out staccato verses and the music goes through the same cycle again and again. This isn't really their biggest problem as anyone who hungers for the old days of Anthrax's 'among the living' etc may find this a nostalgic trip worth making, I think their biggest problem is that there probably aren't that many of those people around to lift this band beyond the club circuit.