Soundtracking Dorkdom: Slough Feg

Here at Dorkadia, we care about what you do for fun. Playing games, watching movies, reading books, and also, listening to music. Eventually we’ll add food prep & fashion, and you will be able to live your lives in a 100% Dorkadia-endorsed manner (editors note: No we won’t). As we work on those elements (Editors note: No, really, we won’t), musical domination continues with Soundtracking Dorkdom,

Which one’s Keyser Soze?

Today, I profile Slough Feg, a San Francisco band that examines the cracks and crevices of both heavy metal and nerdy subject matter. You can find a million bands writing keyboardy falsetto power metal about dragons; how many of them are going to do tempo-switching bluesy jams about Deathsport? Exactly one, and you should be listening to them, like, constantly. They sound like someone grafted Thin Lizzy & Iron Maiden together, dropped them in the Stone Age for a few years, and then dragged their caveman asses through an Irish pub until the whiskey and merry jigs soaked into their very pores. Even their name references a 2000 AD character inspired by Celtic myth. They have no fucks to give, and wouldn’t give one if they did.

The Lord Weird Slough Feg, as they were once known before they got sick of inconsistent record store shelving (seriously), started out in the early 90s as the brainchild of vocalist & mastermind Mike Scalzi (no relation to John). Besides that, Mike’s a philosophy professor at a Bay Area community college, a big stinkin’ sci-fi & fantasy nerd, and a vocal proponent of the idea that heavy metal should be exactly as ridiculous as it wants to be and anyone who’s not here to have fun can fuck right off. What this means is that Slough Feg is the band that opens an album with a bunch of goofy puns about annoying clergymen, then segues into a tribute to Martin Luther and the Reformation, and kicks your ass with both songs.

TRIUMPHANT GESTUUUUURE

Trophies of Conquest: here’s the short version of this article: Slough Feg did a concept album inspired by Traveller. If you want to just stop reading right now so you can run out and buy it, that’s cool. Anyway, it might be their essential album, a mid-career peak of clean and concise songwriting built around a few repeating “theme” riffs; there’s a slice more doom metal than most of their other material, but the slow parts rarely go on long enough to lose focus. Traveller is basically the experience of, well, an over-the-top space opera in musical form. Thrill to the exploits of the dashing mercenary Baltech, but beware the machinations of mad Professor Rickets, and the looming threat of the inhuman Vargr! Also, you know, the first line of vocals is “I am a space pirate, you know my name!” What more do you want?

For my money, though, Slough Feg’s absolute best album is their second effort, Twilight of the Idols. It’s a little sloppier and rougher, with a bit of a raw guitar tone and the occasional off-kilter beat of a rushed recording, but you can feel the energy of that process and it’s worth more than a dozen retakes. Idols reels drunkenly from (fantastic)  Celtic folk to the 70s twin-guitar attack of Thin Lizzy to psychedelic doom-jams, but it’s got all the momentum in the world when it starts off with a song as unbelievably fucking awesome as “Highlander.” I’m burying the lede here, I guess, but I wouldn’t have blamed Scalzi if he’d listened to that and said “Welp, I’ve made a lasting contribution to heavy metal; pack it up, we’re all good.” He didn’t, of course, and thankfully, but Twilight of the Idols remains the best example of the range of Slough Feg’s sound, and a fantastic, if disparate, listening experience.

Prizes of War: the Feg (nobody calls them that) followed up Traveller with two fairly similar efforts, Atavism and Hardworlder. They’re both good examples of the sound that Slough Feg settled on – pulse-pounding, straight-ahead metal, heavy on the lead licks, given to doomy slowdowns with more than a smidgen of those Black Sabbath blues. Atavism might expand your vocabulary, but it’s full of lyrical and musical throwbacks, like the self-explanatory album opener and a hyper-catchy history lesson; Hardworlder plays around with more tempo switches, both post-apocalyptic and spacebound. But both albums might be at their best in their ominous slowdowns, in the torments of Greek myth or the ocean’s eternal hunger. And just for the hell of it, Hardworlder throws in a fuckin’ awesome cover of The Horslips. These two albums are the dependable middle of the Slough Feg catalog; less likely to blow your damn mind, but always, always good to rock out to.

All Slough Feg songs are filed in my iTunes under “Caveman Metal.”

Battlefield Leavings: The Animal Spirits, Slough Feg’s last studio album, starts with the aforementioned punfest “Trick the Vicar” and just rolls merrily along as what must be the band’s, well, plain silliest album to date. As I mentioned above, Mike Scalzi firmly believes that heavy metal shouldn’t take itself too seriously, stating plainly “It’s ridiculous, and it’s great because it’s ridiculous.” (More in this interview, which you should read just for his thoughts about Nirvana.) Spirits restrains itself musically, with a lot of mid-tempo pounders and relatively short songs, but there’s a couple real gems – a to-the-point ripper featuring the vocalist of fellow metal weirdos Brocas Helm, and a kickass song about werewolves.

It’s not clear exactly where Slough Feg will be going with their sound after Spirits; they seem to have settled in as NWOBHM throwbacks with a spectacularly diverse set of lyrics. But then, there’s the fevered brain of Mike Scalzi to contend with – you never know when you’re going to get a Woodstock-tent jam session or an electric-guitar Irish step-dancing number. As long as you go in with an open mind, a thoughtful mien, and a willingness to put all that crap away, throw the horns, and rage, Slough Feg will never let you down.