MUNICIPAL WASTE bassist Land Phil was recently interviewed by AMP Magazine, where he talks about touring, their new album “The Fatal Feast” and some other random things.
You guys have been on the road with metal maniacs GWAR for the past few weeks and the tour is starting to wind down, I can’t help but ask, is touring with GWAR one of the craziest bands you could ever tour with?
I can tell you that they’re the most hardworking band I’ve ever toured with. They arrive early, cover the whole venue in plastic and carpet, and then they have all the monsters that they do and have to set up. They have all guys that do the blood, they have guys blow-dry the costumes and disinfect them; it’s a whole lot of work being done for sure.
Wow, so you guys have been sitting on your newest album The Fatal Feast for quite a while now and it’s finally going to be released in about a week. Are you happy to be finally unleashing new material onto the world?
I feel like our new album is our best one yet, I know that a lot of bands like to say that but we rehearsed all the songs and went into the studio completely prepared. So the songs you hear on the record are very raw and untouched, there’s not a lot of studio trickery it’s just us playing. When you listen to it, it’s good, I think.
You guys stated that for this record you really took your time in writing the songs, do you think that had a an impact of the strength of the material compared to the more quickly assembledMassive Aggressive?
The material on the new record is different in that some of us wrote songs independent from the rest of the band. Rather than all of us getting into the practice space and writing the songs together, sometimes Ryan (Waste, guitar) would write a couple songs, I would write a couple songs and we’re bringing in new material that way which helps freshen up the sound and bring in some new ideas.
So which songs did you work on the most?
There’s a couple, “You’re Cut Off” is one that I made a lot of the riffs for and, “Standards and Practices” is another one that I wrote. Tony (Foresta, vocals) is in charge of the lyrics and we always get together and rehash parts of the songs once we all learn them. Then everyone starts dipping in their own ideas and then it becomes a MUNICIPAL WASTE song. It’s fun to write some riffs on my own or for Ryan to bring in some riffs, making it completely new and different.
You kind of touched on this but how do you guys usually go about making a typical MUNICIPAL WASTE song?
Typically, Ryan and I get together and work on some riffs or we’ll work on them separately and then bring them to Dave (Witte, drums). He’ll make some beats, get the song together and then we get the fully recorded demo to Tony so that he can come up with some lyrics. That’s typically how it goes down. Then we’ll listen to the songs and make changes that we want to make after listening to it like a hundred times. Then we’ll go back in and make another demo. We like going into the studio with every song recorded lyrics and everything. That way we’re completely solid on every aspect of the recording so when we’re in the studio we don’t waste any time messing around.
In the pre-releases of the album, the song “Covered in Sick” has an awesome sample in the intro, but I read that it had to be taken off in the final releases, why did this happen?
Well, we had a cool sample from this movie called “River’s Edge”, and there were some legal things that came of it but it wasn’t bad. We kind of expected it to happen. At first we kind of thought that we were going to get away with the movie sample but it’s weird, there’s a lot of blue tape you have to go through. Maybe not for MORTICIAN, who puts samples in the beginning of every single song. Maybe they just sort of brush it under the rug. But if we were in a position where someone tried to sue us for using something that we weren’t legally allowed to use, it would be a huge problem. So we avoided that and didn’t use it.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
MUNICIPAL WASTE – “Repossession” video:
