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Aaaahahahahaha! At last! At last I have in my clutches another album by The Lord Weird Slough Feg! Dragonheart are really pissing me off with how hard to find they have managed to make this band's CDs. But luck (and The End Records) were with me. This was the second CD for these San Francisco guys, and the first to get anything resembling distribution. I was expecting this to be not as good as the deeply awesome "Traveller", but I was as wrong as I get.

I am so completely in love with this band. Nobody even comes close to sounding like TLWSF, because not only is no one as cool as this, no one is as utterly bizarre. This is an up-to-the-elbows feast of metals riffs, barbaric lyrics, wacky leadwork, and the wry, tuneful holler of Mike Scalzi. This is one of those bands that leave you at a loss as how to describe them. Think stripped down metal riffs a la Manilla Road or Omen with galloping rhythms, Sabbathy leads and flourishes of folky Celtic music. Top it all off with melodic but not operatic vocals and mythic/fantastic lyrics that walk the fine line between cool and goofy. You still won't have any idea what I'm talking about, but trust me, this is one fuckin'-a-cool disc by one of the most talented, dedicated, and utterly unappreciated bands in metal.

Slough Feg are such great songwriters, they make me ill. You can never tell where this band is going to go next, and just when you think you have a song figured out, they go careening off in some completely new direction and play something even cooler than what you were expecting. "Twilight Of The Idols" is energetic, raw, and unrelentingly inventive. Listening to this, I laughed aloud from sheer delight more than once. I banged my head, I played some serious air guitar, and I never stopped grinning. I have to give this full marks, simply because this is music that embodies everything I love heavy metal for.

This is a Dragonheart release, which means digipack, about which less said the better. But the cover is a piece of signature cheesy artwork by longtime TSR stalwart Erol Otus, who did so much artwork for Dungeons & Dragons stuff that just looking at this cover takes me back to Saturday afternoons gathered around the table with friends, pizza, and a shitload of dice. All the lyrics are included, and who would want to miss such delights as "Across his back ten Ulstermen were carried from the lake/ And soon there were ten sundered heads each thrust upon a stake". Or "Frozen android cracks the ice and puts a blaster in my hands." Eh? You can't argue with stuff like that.

So go and get "Twilight Of The Idols" if you can find a copy somewhere. If you love real old heavy metal that will put a big fuckin' smile on your face, then you owe it to yourself to get this CD. It rules, it rules some more, it rules over here, it rules over there…

What are you doing still listening to me? Go! Get it!