“Un-listenable, putrid, turgid, filthy, repellent, abhorrent, deplorable and the collective cultural zeitgeist of music has suffered tremendously ever since this collection of degenerate young men first learned how to desecrate a guitar,” - are all descriptors that your Church-going Grandmother might use to describe the new Sanguisugabogg offering, Hideous Aftermath.
With their third album, Ohio death metallers Sanguisugabogg are laying down the gauntlet of brutality in a way that seems to be telling their fans, ‘You haven’t heard anything yet,’ regarding their first two albums. Known for their tongue-in-cheek response to parodying the ‘sillier’ side of death metal, Hideous Aftermath is a statement that tells their fans they’re done messing around with things being ‘tongue in cheek’. This album is more tongue in an industrial paper shredder.
Rotted Entanglement blasts things off with some focused blastbeats and capable death growls; the production quality is as crisp as it is filthy, which is something very few death metal bands can achieve, but with Kurt Ballou producing (Nails, Converge and Code Orange), it’s almost no surprise that standards are this high. Overall, the song teases and titillates their fans with what is to come, leaving an overall impression of an almost ‘crunchier Pissgrave’ with downtuned Primitive Man-style heavy hitting riffs, which makes for a winning combination for those who like their death metal just a little bit groovy.
Without giving their listeners a chance to breathe, Sanguisugabogg launch into ‘Felony Abuse of a Corpse’ – do not attempt to Google this without a VPN. Judging by the song’s title, it’s clear this song is obviously going to be about rainbows and unicorns, if the rainbows contained yellow rain and the unicorns were sodomising each other with their horns. Here, the band can achieve that ever-so-elusive ‘evil’ sound to their work. Sanguisugabogg slow down to remind their listeners that death metal isn’t just about pushing out face-melting blast beats like a collapsed rectum, it’s also about aura farming anxiety and a sordid existential disgust of: “Wait a minute, how did I go from enjoying The Number of the Beast by Iron Maiden to genuinely enjoying music like this!?” The song ends, leaving their fans with a feeling of an extreme musical ‘post-nut clarity.’
But with ‘Ritual of Autophagia’ – which refers to the act of eating your own flesh- Sanguisugabogg are saying: ‘Fuck all that noise, plunge yourself back into the depths of depravity we’ve created for you and just enjoy it before you go back to your stupid little job, to provide for your stupid little family in your stupid little life!’ Vocalist Devin Swank becomes almost primal in his guttural and tortured wails in this track, as the band attempts to steamroll their listeners with a relentlessly industrial sound.
‘Heinous Testimony’ – which also may describe their listeners’ future experiences when forced to explain to a jury of their peers why they have been googling the subjects listed in this album – trundles along like Thomas the Tank Engine if one episode he decided to experiment with crystal meth. The song culminates with a breakdown to put Kayne to shame.
Abhorrent Contraception is where things start to deviate into power violence territory, which is almost always welcome amongst death metal fans with a heavily grooved, abrupt tempo, which is complemented by stabbing key changes that come across as almost piercing the flesh itself. The rest of the album goes along in a similar trajectory, with occasional riffs, blastbeats and unpredictable signatures that chaotically conglomerate together in a way that will illicit many a mean-faced gurn, the highest of praises from death fans.
Sanguisugabogg are a band that can often find themselves in the same conversation as bands such as 200 Stab Wounds, Tomb Mould and Gatecreeper, the new school of death metal. With Hideous Aftermath, Sanguisugabogg seem to be standing slightly ahead of the aforementioned. If this is the direction in which Death Metal is heading, many young newcomers will be joining along for the ride, and the old school purists will just have to get out of the way or get with the new relentlessly brutal programme.