The Lord Weird Slough Feg

The Lord Weird Slough Feg

New Organon

Cruz Del Sur Music

14 June 2019

The year 2020 will be 30 years since they formed in Pennsylvania, U.S.A. Hiatuses, relocation to California, member changes, record company changes, hair loss, and this is the tenth studio album, according to Metal Archives. The band plays its own peculiar style of dueling guitars, very much influenced by the 1970s. In the mid 1990s the band’s debut stood out as so different from groove-bro-macho-man metal, death-growl-eat-mic-chop-chop metal, black-makeup-jail-dude metal, industrial-what-what metal, melodic-so-called-death metal, so on and so forth. They formed in 1990, but it seemed like they wanted nothing to do with anything that had just happened in the 1980s, and who could blame them. Here we are, then, if you have not heard them, let’s cut to the chase. On this new album there is a huge Thin Lizzy double guitar sound (as pretty much always has been the case), the production is wild and unpolished like much of hard rock in the 1970s, the singing is melodic but maybe a bit nasal and kind of raw. Humans, not robots, says Slough Feg. The lyrics seem like a person that has been reading lots of literature at the bar, while downing some libations, perhaps too many, and is now explaining that literature to other intoxicated people at the bar. They sound like a close relative of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, with 1979 as a good year, if you will.

The lyrics might come across as inebriated, educated, folky, pub philosophy or all of the above. For instance, they have a song called “Coming of Age in the Milky Way,” which if you can figure out what it means, then you are a very special person. There’s also “Sword of Machiavelli,” which is a two-minute discourse on power, and speaking of discourse, they also have a song called “Discourse on Equality,” and that’s the kind of band they are. They have a song called “Being and Nothingness,” and they talk about crime, time, wine and rats in less than three minutes, which is great because it is way better than actually reading the book itself, and a good way of avoiding that other book called Being and Time.

Rock and roll, friends, it’s all in the name of classic rock and roll by way of heavy metal by an Irish-by-way-of-California-Pennsylvania band that still sounds like themselves after decades, and it’s like the 1980s never happened. Slough Feg went straight from 1979 to 1990, and that was such a cool maneuver that they pulled that it is necessary to figure out what they did with the time machine. The groovy year of 1969 turned into hard rock 1979 to Slough Feg in 2019, and the boys are back in town (the boys are back in town) for some good ole rock and roll philosophy.

thelordweirdsloughfeg.bandcamp.com