Sanguisugabogg emerged at the turn of the 2020s as one of the most raucous names of the new American death-metal scene. Hailing from Ohio, the band cultivate a resolutely regressive death metal — slow, sludgy, groovy — fed by a gore humour and a deliberately vulgar aesthetic that cuts against the genre’s seriousness. Homicidal Ecstasy, hailed by the critics (a 79 average across six reviews), confirms this assumed identity.
What the press retain is the gleeful heaviness of the thing. Sanguisugabogg bank not on technicality but on thick groove, on those dragging riffs that bend the neck, on those guttural growls straight out of the swamps. It is a death metal of immediate pleasure, without pretension and without complex.
Musically, the thick, muddy production serves this purpose perfectly. The band alternate sludge slowdowns and brutal accelerations, in an effective dramaturgy that favours visceral impact. One senses the heritage of slam and brutal death, revisited with a wholly contemporary offhandedness.
The record does not, however, escape a certain monotony: by dint of banking on the same sludgy register, it ends up going in circles, and its schoolboy humour will tire those seeking more depth. It is a guilty pleasure more than a landmark work.
Verdict: 8/10. A filthy, heavy, delightful record that fully assumes its gleeful stupidity. Death metal without pretension, but devilishly effective.
