Slough Feg - Ape Uprising
September 22 2009 at 11:05:00 AM
Grape Ape. Grape Ape. The Lord Weird Slough Feg writes songs that encompass yards of shelves bowed with the very ideas for sci-fi and fantasy tracts still gestating in the minds of ratbag Ritalin cases, akimbo, frothing, the begrudging joy of parents juiced on the novelty of their little darling machine-gunning out Zelazny does
Inherit the Wind does
Galapagos. But our scribes are not the results of think-tank Petri dish. Slough Feg seeps the same neo-Viking asphalt wanderlust typified by the rural denim/leather brood that invade the interstate pizzeria for dollar draft night, pumping change into a juke heavy on Heep, Nazareth, Rose Tattoo, wearing as much beer as they ingest, wrestling arm and leg and confined to last call stand-up crapper humps, ol’ ladies oh-oh’in into oiled gearhead hands over “Miss Misery.”
This record, something like the seventh Slough Feg full-length, smells of the proverbial basement apartment, four guys to 400 square feet, floors unseen, carpeted in Chinese take-out and crushed domestic cans, mold and weed and stale beer reek, a gauzy haze perforating light that serves to only allow glimpses of poster likenesses ranging Valeria to Vampirella. The lyrical content may skirt environs apropos of Kipling, the Celts, or even Steven Pinker’s poodle-headed notions of “Yerkish,” but the music is base Heavy Metal, understood to any red-blooded male wont to tug and toss a mitt of Miracle Whip in the general vicinity of Tanya Roberts. As cheeky as Melvins doing Alice Cooper and every bit the band the Gates of Slumber aspires to be, Slough Feg posits “concept record” chintz with neither Gilmour nor Geddy, its program a undulating Jager hoark of an art founded – and long lost – on hyperbolic image and affectation.
Scalzi and Tringali play guitar how Kinison told us to eat pussy. Alphabet licked riffs, a font fragile but somehow focused on the sort of malt liquor named for life-threatening beasts and natural disasters. Scalzi’s voice is what you always asked for in a Dungeon Master. Bass and drums are battle ready, only missing twin armored dopes, standards abreast, flags rippling scarlet and bone white in schwag choked wind. Built for iron horse initiates, burnt-at-both ends wannabes, folks who thought Atomic Rooster and Arazchel must be Metal ‘cause their cover art resembled the inchoate content of Bon Scott’s wet dreams, Slough Feg may have to start performing blood-soaked, ashen, their amps littered with sigils and Crowleian jibber to gain the attention they’ve deserved for a decade. Don’t take my word for it; I can’t even get my Internet gossip right.
[Stewart Voegtlin]
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I thought about her for about five minutes this morning.
If the visceral and refined are mutually exclusive - as you make them out to be - then some of the most original and provocative art of the last century ceases to exist.
This might make a good topic for one of your expository pieces...