For fans of: Thin Lizzy, Cirith Ungol, Iron Maiden, Rush
The best metal album of the 2000's.
There, I said it. That's what this is, by any fair measure of the genre as a whole. In a decade oversaturated with a glut of homogenous range-compressed trem-picking deathblacketc bands with drummers that sound like a bike wheel stuffed with baseball cards, the best breath of fresh air anyone could've asked for is a band that remembers what it was all about in the beginning; tactile, swaggering, loud and athletic charisma. This album is plausibly recorded and mastered, suggesting a band whose stage presence matches the intensity and sheer boisterous enjoyability of their music directly, without gimmicky shock lyrics or imagery. And for all that, this is still hardly the simple bone-dry grunt of a band like Motorhead; Traveller is a concept album about a tabletop game that may be familiar in memory to some board members, and the narrative never feels forced or contrived as it proceeds, never feels as though the music was simply done for it's own sake rather than out of service to the story being told. The music abruptly changes, crescendos and withdraws as needed from character and narrator to character and narrator, like a musical, maintaining a remarkable balance that never once seems either too serious or too campy. The notion of a metal opera has been rather embarrassingly floated before - but a metal space opera?
Would you like to know more?As with my other reviews, I could go over the music specifically, and I may well do just that at some point too. But as a concept album, perhaps the concept behind it would make more sense to explain in order to convey what the album is about. Having never played GDW's tabletop game, I can't tell you exactly how much or little it has in common with the source, but the story is in brief about a mad professor who attempts to create a race of half human, half wolfmen (called "Vargr") and their attempts to overthrow their prior masters. Evidently there is a chockload of cheeky Nietzschean subtext about ubermenschen uprising, being that the band's founder and principal songwriter is a professor of philosophy at Diablo Valley College in California, but I will leave that part of the album to anyone but me. For that matter, I scarcely follow the lyrics, so outstanding is the arrangement and the musicianship with which it is carried out.
Right from the start, the broad theatrics of the opening musical track, "The Spinward Marches", ought to be direct, simple and yet unpretentious enough to command your attention for the time being - and then the moment the music fades into the second track, "High Passage/Low Passage", you'll fall victim immediately to the band's first high-energy hook. I've compared singer Mike Scalzi to none other than Jim Morrison before, and to see him in person would only serve to reinforce that impression, but his presence and belting vocal style on record are enough to make this comparison fit. Along with guitarist John Cobbett, their antics are far from timid but never the tedious clinical noodling that makes the novelty of prog and technical metal bands lose appeal after not too long - again, unbounded macho swagger, albeit in a knowing, self-aware way, is the order of the day here. Greg Haa, who must be one of the more memorable black drummers in heavy metal by virtue alone of being one of the few, has a handle right down on primal, Celtic beats that have characterized Slough Feg apart from other more traditional heavy metal contemporaries like Manilla Road or Brocas Helm, along with bassist and songwriter Adrian Maestas.
I dare you to keep your feet still during the militant, bounding rhythms of "Gene-o-cide", to not sing along with the accusatory tone of the grand revelation during the concluding moments of "Vargr Theme/Confrontation", to not scat and hum along with the eminently hummable, scattable guitar melodies of "Vargr Moon" as the story wends it's way from movement to lively movement. This is an album with appeal that can and should reach well beyond the traditional metal demographic, with arrangement and musicianship that are truly as essential to the making of a good album in any genre as they are in heavy metal. No screaming, no dense fusillade of indistinct notes, no bludgeoning, nasal drumwork - metal as it is at the core, and as it was meant to be exported.
http://www.myspace.com/sloughfeg
Cruz Del Sur Music
US/CA distributor
