Richmond ragers Municipal Waste have just released a new video for their song “Acid Sentence,” from last year’s Massive Aggressive LP (Earache Records). With its combination of slasher mayhem and thrashing madness, it looks like the best video you’d see on any given episode of Headbanger’s Ball circa 1990–except a lot gorier. Therefore, it’s fitting that the video premiered yesterday on fangoria.com, the internet home of the long-running magazine devoted to all things horror.
Richmond ragers Municipal Waste have just released a new video for their song “Acid Sentence,” from last year’s Massive Aggressive LP (Earache Records). With its combination of slasher mayhem and thrashing madness, it looks like the best video you’d see on any given episode of Headbanger’s Ball circa 1990–except a lot gorier. Therefore, it’s fitting that the video premiered yesterday on fangoria.com, the internet home of the long-running magazine devoted to all things horror. As a preteen in the late 80s, my initial experience with Fangoria involved stumbling upon it in the magazine racks at the grocery store, shelved next to the copies of Circus and Hit Parader that I’d read while my mother spent what felt to me like an eternity roaming up and down each aisle in the store. I’d get bored with reading about Guns N’ Roses, pick up a copy of Fangoria, and get frightened out of my wits by bloody still-frame captures from the latest installments of the Friday The 13th or Nightmare On Elm Street series. Magazines that cool have long since disappeared from grocery store shelves, sadly enough. What do preteen boys read while they wait for their moms to finish grocery shopping now, Maxim? What a depressing thought.
The video for “Acid Sentence” has just as much capacity to shock and fascinate the viewer as did those long-ago issues of Fangoria, mixing shots of Municipal Waste performing in a creepy abandoned warehouse with a mini-movie about a serial killer who commits ultra-violent murders before dissolving the bodies of his victims in vats of acid. The black-and-white narrative adds the blood-spattered violence of Herschell Gordon Lewis’s groundbreaking gore films (Blood Feast, Color Me Blood Red) to the low-budget gothic atmosphere of Vincent Price films from the late 50s and early 60s (think House On Haunted Hill). The gore is certainly explicit enough to keep “Acid Sentence” off MTV, which is a moot point considering how long it’s been since MTV showed a video anyway.
Musically, the song is a great example of Municipal Waste’s revival of the crossover era of the late 80s. In fact, it straddles the line between hardcore and metal in a more sure-footed manner than any of the bands from that era ever managed. It combines the speedy hardcore of D.R.I. circa Dealing With It with Anthrax’s thrash metal sound, even incorporating a half-speed mosh part straight out of that band’s best album, Among The Living. The lyrics tell the same story as the video, which goes beyond being a mere visual advertisement for the band. It looks like the trailer for a really great horror movie you’ve never seen, and the music only increases the awesomeness. Go watch it right now.
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“Acid Sentence” is posted on the main page at fangoria.com. Massive Aggressive can be purchased from Earache Records here.
