Metal Psalter Slough Feg's Mike Scalzi Interview Page 1

Philip A. Wickstrand is a contributing freelance writer for Metal Psalter Webzine. He sat down with vocalist/guitarist Mike Scalzi on Friday, February 19 at Berbati's Pan in Portland, OR to conduct this interview.

Buried in the underground for years, Slough Feg spent their time honing the raft, striving to make the best Metal possible and have been successful far more often than the vast majority of their peers. Now with the classic Metal revival of the last few years, Slough Feg are poised at the top of the movement, ready to bring the fruits of their nearly twenty years of labor to the masses.

Phil: You're playing Portland and Seattle this weekend, what are your tour plans for the year at large?

Mike Scalzi: There actually are quite a few. So far this year, we went to Calgary, Canada to do this Heavy Metal conference. It was pretty weird… it was really weird, actually. It was a conference, we played, but it was like all these people from labels at the conference or people who wanted to know about Metal or be in bands. It was kind of sad, like "You want to be successful in Metal, go to this conference".

Phil: Successful in Metal? What's that? (laughter)

Mike: That's what I said. They put me on the panel for a minute and this guy asked, I don't know the word they used, but it was like "professional" or "successful" musician and I started laughing or something. I was like, "How do you spell that?" But then we went to Norway, two or three weeks ago, to play one show. That was pretty cool. We got flown over there and everything and it was a good deal, but it was kind of weird being there a day and a half, two days.

Phil: You've played that festival before, right?

Mike: No.

Phil: Hmmm… I seem to remember you playing some Norwegian festival around this time of year before.

Mike: No, we've never done it before. Yeah, they had it last year. It was cool. It wasn't a huge festival or anything; it was a show the size of a place like this. But we did that and now we're doing these two shows this weekend. We're playing a couple shows in San Francisco next month with PENTAGRAM and ANVIL CHORUS, but that's just local. In April, April first, we're flying to Milwaukee and doing twelve shows the whole way from (the) Chicago area, down through Texas and then through the Southwest and then L.A. and San Francisco, Oakland. Then in the very end of May, we're going to do the West Coast again, just the West Coast, I think five or six shows with THE GATES OF SLUMBER. And that should be it for the summer… maybe in the fall, though. It's a lot for what we've been doing. Last year we hardly did shit, so that's like a lot of stuff.

Phil: It's been since that show at that terrible East End that you've been up here.

Mike: Who?

Phil: The East End - the last place you played up here.

Mike: Oh yeah - that was pretty shitty.

Phil: Yeah, if I hadn't been standing five feet from you, I wouldn't have been able to hear the vocals.

Mike: Well, that's the way it is everywhere, particularly that show was pretty brutal that way. That wasn't the best show, was it? No.

Phil: I swore I'd never go to that venue again.

Mike: Oh really? I didn't like it that much, no. So we're doing a lot of stuff I guess compared to the last year when we kind of did a few things here and there, but weren't very active.

Phil: Now that "Ape Uprising" has been out for a little while, where do you feel it stands with the rest of the SLOUGH FEG catalog?

Mike: It's pretty good, I guess, but I don't know… it's hard to say. We play the song "Ape Uprising" live a lot and "The Hunchback of Notre Doom", the first song. It's a good record. Let's face it, a lot of people who get our records have only heard the one they've got, they have the other ones, they don't know about the other ones. It's not as good as "Twilight of the Idols", it's not as good as "Down Among the Deadmen" maybe, but otherwise, it's probably better than anything else or as good as anything else. I mean, a lot of people like the records that I don't think are that good that we did, like "Traveler" - I think that's the weakest album. A lot of people think it's our best and I think "Down Among the Deadmen" the best, "Twilight of the Idols" may be the best also, I don't know, and "Atavism"; those three. And nobody seems to agree with me on that. But "Down Among the Deadmen" is the one that's really our… do you agree with that? Do you think that's our best album?

Phil: I'd probably have to go with "Atavism", but that was my introduction to the band, so I think that sways my opinion.

Mike: Well, I really like "Atavism", too - I like those three the best, you know? But this one, it's as good as "Atavism" I think, maybe. It's not our best album, but it's definitely not our worst. I mean, I listened to it recently, like a week ago, and I hadn't heard it for awhile 'cause you get burned out when you make it and the whole next year you don't really want to hear it. I listened to it again and I'm like, "Wow - we did a good job on this!" It's raw, it's sort of back to the really raunchy sort of… it's a very SLOUGH FEG album. It kind of repeats some of the same ideas musically that we did before, but not in a way that I think is really bad, I like it. Although, the last two songs I think are kind of filler. I'd kind of just like to edit those out. If it weren't for those last two songs, I think it would be one of our best - it would be a fantastic album with no time wasted on it, you know? So I guess it's pretty good.

Phil: Are there any lyrical themes that you would like to tackle that you haven't on previous releases?

Mike: Not really, no. I'm sick of everything. I'm sick of Heavy Metal lyrics. I'm going to tackle things - we've already recorded the basic tracks for a new record and I wrote lyrics, but it's not like I get ambitious about lyrical stuff; I just kind of write about whatever comes out. It's usually the same bullshit. This one is an incredibly unoriginal idea, the new album - not musically - but the lyrics. There's one song called "Ask the Casket" about a vampire, you know, about the show "Dark Shadows". Have you ever heard of that?

Phil: Yeah, I think I saw a few episodes when I was a kid.

Mike: A really campy kind of vampire drama and there actually is another one about some guy who is insane who thinks he's a werewolf but isn't in our songs on this next record. But the lyrical content on it that's the most important is the first song, it's called "Trick the Vicar", so we have "Trick the Vicar", "Ask the Casket" and it's just all these different ideas. I don't know how this happened, but usually the stupidest idea we can come up with is the best one and it's the one we make the record on - "Ape Uprising". Someone at some point had said "Trick the vicar" and then we were like, "Oh, trick the vicar" and we were somewhere like an airport or something wasting time trying to come up with these different ideas like that, like "Perplex the pontiff, confuse the cleric, trick the vicar, baffle the bishop, addle the abbot, non-plus the nun" (laughter) and this really, really silly, stupid stuff and it just turned into this song. The lyrics to that are something we haven't explored yet and actually, I'm really into this idea, doing like sort of a long series of puns on the same Heavy Metal cliché idea. Like think about it - in the early '80s, it was all about puns, right? Like RATT songs - every song is like a cliché, you know what I mean? And "You've Got Another Thing Coming" and whatever and so, not that way, but to get into something like "Trick the Vicar" - like, what does that mean? Well, it just means perplex the pontiff - same thing. All these synonymous things that you can build a song that's just entertaining and kind of ends up sounding like an old cabaret piece from "Pirates of Penzance", which is kind of gay, but it's something we haven't done yet; it seems we've done everything else yet that we've wanted to - it's where things are going I think. (laughter)

Phil: Musically, what can we expect from the new material?

Mike: Well, that's the important part, I think. Our albums have been going more and more in the direction, for some time now, since "Atavism", of sing-songy lyrical kind of… "Ape Uprising" is not as much in that direction perhaps, but since "Atavism", I decided I wanted to do more sing-songy, something more that sounds like something THE BEATLES could do or something like that with heavier guitars. So this next album is going to be really in that direction of really raw guitars, maybe even more of an OVERDRIVE-y, AC/DC type production. Not like super Heavy Metal, you know. Like less saturated production, less distortion on the guitars, more clean, even louder vocals, more vocal dominated songs, but with a "Twilight of the Idols"-ish old styled SLOUGH FEG… what's the word I'm looking for? Sort of a primitive, sort of churning. That style that we've developed, yes, definitely, but maybe less guitar dominated, maybe more vocal dominated. We're just going more and more in the direction of recognizable, catchy songs - that's what we're about, you know, so that's what we want to go in the direction of."

Phil: When can we expected the album to be recorded?

Mike: Well, it's been recorded, some of it, already. But when it's going to be released… we have two different labels putting it out, one in America, one in Europe. They've told me both that it can't be any time before late summer. So it'll be sometime like August. It should be right about August of this year, which leaves us a lot of time to do it.

Phil: When can we expect a formal announcement on the label?

Mike: Who's we? You and the two other people who are going to buy it? (laughter)

Phil: Hey!!! There are four of us that will be buying that album, I'll have you know.

Mike: No, no, I'm sorry. What did you say?

Phil: When can we expect a formal announcement on the label?

Mike: You mean when is the label going to announce it or for who's going to put it out?

Phil: Who's going to put it out?

Mike: Profound Lore is going to put it out in the United States and Cruz del Sur is going to put it out in Europe, so there you go.

Phil: Okay, I just wasn't sure if it was one of those things that wasn't supposed to be announced yet.