Unleash the Bastards

Municipal Waste's "Unleash the Bastards" brings the crossover thrash revival of the mid-2000s to its most concentrated and gleefully disreputable expression — a track that makes no pretense of ambition beyond the immediate and overwhelming goal of generating maximum chaos in the shortest possible time. The production has a deliberate low-fidelity quality that references hardcore punk's ethos as much as metal's power, the guitars carrying a buzzsaw tone that cuts through rather than bludgeons. Tony Foresta's vocal delivery is pure punk snarl, the words delivered with a contempt for careful articulation that is itself a statement of aesthetic values. The riffs change with a frequency that would be disorienting in other contexts but here generates an almost comic acceleration, as if the song cannot contain itself. Municipal Waste emerged from Richmond, Virginia's punk scene with a clear awareness of how funny and how serious thrash's original impulse was simultaneously — the genre's outsider energy, its rejection of mainstream aesthetics, its embrace of cheap beer and physical confrontation as legitimate cultural positions. "Unleash the Bastards" has a thesis: the bastards are us, the audience, and the proper response to being addressed is to do whatever the most chaotic version of yourself would do. The track is three minutes that feel like being inside a very fast machine. Best experienced at a show, standing near the front.