There are other ways to get inside someone’s head, of course. With fingers through the eye sockets, perhaps. An ice-pick through the roof of the mouth. Or a good old-fashioned hammer to the back of the skull. For a new generation of death metallers, provocation and shock value is absolutely integral to what they do. With a band name that translates (very loosely) to ‘blood-sucking toilet’ and a brutal sound that owes debts to underground legends like Scattered Remnants, Mortal Decay and Pyrexia, Sanguisugabogg are in the front of the pack.
“A lot of people are angry right now,” Devin reckons of the demand for truly horrible music. “I got into this when I was an angry kid, and when you’re living in this world, being constantly nickel-and-dimed, seeing people being far better off for doing far less work, it’s easy to be pissed off.
“Death metal doesn’t play into political agendas. It’s the anti-norm. You take everything that’s mainstream and piss in it. Instead of a love song, or a catchy hook, you have songs about killing people and riffs that make you want to throw your fist into the air. It’s about not being a part of any organisation, not being a part of any clique or any cliché. You’re just a different kind of person, a different breed.”
So, as the comment sections so often speculate, are Sanguisugabogg really such ‘sick fucks’? Around the gleefully bloody video release for Face Ripped Off from last year’s second LP Homicidal Ecstasy, for instance, they were accused of glorifying violence against women. Elsewhere, the obvious question: how can these ostensibly nice dudes conjure such gut-wrenching imagery?
“I write my lyrics in the first-person, where it’s just me and the listener,” Devin unpacks. “I’m trying to kill them.”
Confessed horror film fanatics, who even co-produced a pair of gloriously NSFW videos for early single Gored In The Chest with infamous splatter studio Troma, Devin likens Sanguisugabogg’s vibe to the slasher movies of the ’70s and ’80s such as Halloween or Friday The 13th.
“There’s no real backstory,” he says of the idea. “There’s just this menacing figure killing everything in sight. Plus, they’re not afraid to be a little cheesy and have some fun. I guess I just want to be Johnny Depp’s character in A Nightmare On Elm Street with that puffy hair and those tight pants!”
Acknowledging the primal brutality swirling inside us all isn’t necessarily a bad thing, Devin understands. And, obviously, finding the right place to release your wrath can be surprisingly healthy.
“Violence is a secondary emotion,” he says. “You resort to it because you’re feeling something else. That applies to music as it does in life. I grew up poor in an industrial Midwestern town in rust-belt Ohio. I never had it easy. Everyone wants to be Superman, but when you’re feeling angry, sometimes you want to be the opposite. You want to be a day of reckoning. You want to be the wrong person to cross.
“I get that there are people who could genuinely get upset about some of these [subjects],” he concedes, “and I don’t want to minimise that in any way. But these songs are an expression of those dark feelings. It’s not that I’d ever actually wish to inflict harm on anybody. In real life, I’m the guy that coaches sports and hangs out with my fiancée who has a degree in women’s studies!”