Slough Feg
Hardworlder

You can't survive the Eighties, there's not much to do. For better or worse, that's what the Lord Weird Slough Feg, Slough Feg to their friends, want to remind us. Formed in Pennsylvania in the early Nineties, it almost seems like they've set themselves the mission of bringing back the purest eighties hard/heavy to its highest splendor. Always led by the tireless Mike Scalzi, a man who, judging by his voice, must have been raised on bread and Manilla Road, they've been coming out for a good fifteen years with frightening regularity with an album every two years, give or take a year, asserting, if there was ever any need, the "rules" of the purest and most uncontaminated heavy metal.

Having learned well the lesson of Iron Maiden and Thin Lizzy, with two guitars always ready to chase each other, and a solid rhythm section, they've been traveling up and down the United States for years, and occasionally Europe, with a repertoire that, for the topics dealt with, has a devastating "nerd" potential: Celtic myths, science fiction, role-playing games, all accompanied by illustrations that often appear to have just come out of a Seventies fantasy comic. The Slough Feg, it must be said, don't invent anything themselves, but their strong personality saves them from the abyss of a thousand clone bands: what their influences are becomes clear from the first listen, but thank God we're not faced with yet another terrible copy of the first three Helloween albums, with Japanese cartoon chorus and "helicopter" drums. If you think about it, it's paradoxical: obsessively focused on Eighties metal and... born in 1990! Out of time by nature. Because listening to them you really have to wonder if they are some group of nostalgic forty-year-olds (which maybe they are) or some semi-clandestine "cult band" from the Eighties, from some reissue known only to the most die-hard fetishists: listening to a random album from their extensive discography you would say that if we really want to exaggerate, we are in the presence of some collector's gem labeled... 1986, give or take a month. Bombastic digital productions? And what are they? Scalzi and company bask in the golden realm of analog, no stories. Instruments well highlighted, the bass is there and you can hear it, the drums do their duty showing that you can have rhythm even if you don't have a sprinter behind the skins, plug in the jack and go.

The intro, a couple of minutes, immediately makes it clear what our guys are made of before introducing us to the beautiful "Tiger! Tiger!", with two guitars that take wholeheartedly from the Seventies, and which introduces the protagonist of the album, Hardworlder, "the inhabitant of a difficult world" (Tonino Carotone anyone?), a man now accustomed to any form of adventure, among burning spaceships and escapes to distant planets. Another piece truly worth noting is the cadenced "Sea Wolf", which shows how you can be suggestive even without pressing on the accelerator, with its acoustic guitars and always evocative voice of Scalzi. Also noteworthy are the interesting renditions of "Dearg Doom" by Horslips and "Street Jammer" by Manilla Road, which clearly demonstrate the inclinations of the four Americans. Aside from a couple of episodes, however, it is noticeable not only that there isn't a track that stands out above the others, as they are all of good quality, but also how each of them has a decisive weight in the overall quality of the final product: with tracks fading into each other (considering the way they are "cut" very often the last actual seconds of one song turn out to be the first of the next) you almost get the impression of facing an old prog record, a long suite made up of different passages that are each associated with a title in turn and not a simple collection of disconnected songs, as wanted by the best Seventies tradition.

In conclusion, Slough Feg will never play in front of huge crowds and will never sell millions of albums and the fact that nearly twenty years after their debut they remain a deliberately niche entity only confirms this theory. On the other hand, it’s impressive to see how a band of this kind, driven by few means other than pure passion, has managed to build such an intricate career with a high-quality rate, while many sacred monsters of the genre have long since gotten lost in self-referential or anonymous albums. "Hardworlder", manned by the very Italian Cruz del Sur, could be the "excuse" to finally enter Slough Feg's parallel dimension. Undoubtedly, one of the most pleasant discoveries of recent years.

"Hardworlder":

1. The Return of Dr. Universe

2. Tiger! Tiger!

3. The Sea Wolf

4. Hardworlder

5. The Spoils

6. Frankfurt-Hahn Airport Blues

7. Galactic Nomad

8. Dearg Doom (Horslips cover)

9. Insomnia

10. Poisoned Treasures

11. Karma-Kazee

12. Whirling Vortex

13. Street Jammer (Manilla Road cover)

Michael Scalzi – vocals and guitar

"Don" Angelo Trincali - guitar

Adrian Maestas - bass

Antoine Reuben - drums