#72: But how do you pronounce it?
#72: But how do you pronounce it?
Sanguisugabogg; Ombiigizi; S Y Z Y G Y X; the Anthema Xxhe; NxxxxxS
This month, it’s all about the first question these artists get.
Sanguisugabogg
Pronounced “sang-wa-sue-ga-bogg”
You may recall Sanguisugabogg from BNB #28, when they received the award for Most Illegible Band Logo…
…but they also get high marks for Least Pronounceable Name. If you have a logo like that, you’re legally forbidden from playing anything but metal, or “DOWN TUNED DRUG DEATH” per their Bandcamp. But how do you say that name?
There’s a handy Twitter video where vocalist Devin Swank pronounces it and explains its origins.
https://twitter.com/hardlorepod/status/1646553621503569921
Time was when that URL would automatically convert to a tweet embed, but since Human Cringe Elon Musk picked a fight with Substack, Twitter no longer allows it. Well you can hear “Sanguisugabogg” pronounced at the start of this video:
Its origins go back to the group’s original guitarist and co-founder, Cameron Boggs (who uses they/them). Their stage name in an old band was “Sanguisuga,” Latin for “bloodsucker,” and when they learned “bog” is an old English word for toilet, they were sold. “I was like, ‘Sweet, so it’s like a bloodsucking toilet,’” Boggs told Revolver in 2021.
Considering Sanguisugabogg is a death-metal band named after a blood-sucking toilet, these song titles will come as no surprise: “Felching Filth,” “Dead as Shit,” “Black Market Vasectomy,” “Testicular Rot,” “Necrosexual Deviant,” “Succulent Decedent,” you get the idea.
That last one comes from the group’s demo, 2019’s Pornographic Seizures. Suffering from writer’s block, Boggs told Revolver they watched a bunch of horror movies and “translated what they saw on screen into words.”
That meant a lot of lyrics about violence against women, which sparked some backlash. This is both surprising and relieving, because holy shit, those themes are de rigueur in extreme metal. It takes the fun out of writing about the genre’s inherent absurdity, even when it’s ostensibly ironic.
I’ve never heard of a band getting flak for it, but then again, I’m not hanging out on /r/metal all day. Boggs adjusted course on the band’s full-length debut, Tortured Whole:
“I feel really weird about the whole violence toward women lyrics because it wasn’t supposed to be like that,” Boggs explains. “I can say that forever, but the only thing I can really do to move on from that is learn from it and make it better. So this album is all about killing the fuck out of men and pedophiles.”
Cool…? Why can’t Boggs make nice music for nice people?
Maybe they are now, because they parted ways with Sanguisugabogg not long after Tortured Whole. I hope they’re doing okay, because that Revolver story was a little concerning. Boggs described a bleak upbringing that seemed to create a hole they were filling with massive amounts of psychedelics and pot.
“Nothing in my life has ever gone right,” they say. “But somehow everything with this band — knock on wood — has fallen into place the way it should. The aesthetic, touring, how we found our people, our management, our sound, the way our album came out.”
“I used to be depressed, anxious, just horribly weird and sad all the time,” Boggs concludes. “And I feel like I picked myself out of a hole with this band and I don't even feel like that same person at all anymore. It rules.”
It’s a bummer reading that and knowing what followed. So to end on a more positive (?) note, here’s the video for “Menstrual Envy,” which the band made with Troma Studios, featuring homicidal penises.
Ombiigizi
Pronounced “om-BEE-ga-ZAY”
From ironic extreme metal to burying the needle on the Sincerity Meter: Ombiigizi—stylized OMBIIGIZI—meaning “this is noisy,” per their Bandcamp.
Settle down, students, because there’s a lot to process here. And yes, it will all be on the final.
The Canadian duo of Anishinaabe musicians Zoon (Daniel Monkman) and Status/Non-Status (Adam Sturgeon, formerly known as WHOOP-Szo) explores “their cultural histories through sound,” per the press release announcing 2021’s Sewn Back Together.
For instance, lead single “Residential Military” “responds to Canada’s current reckoning with its history of military industrial and residential school systems by introducing a concept that Adam describes as Indigenous Futurisms – ‘finding the past to picture a future which is not always so easy here and now.’”
It’s heady stuff, complemented by liner notes by Anishinaabe writer Waubgeshig Rice touting Ombiigizi as stewards of the Anishinaabe revival and describing Sewn Back Together as a “passionate journey” that “meanders like a nurturing stream.”
Like that meandering stream, Sewn Back Together is surprisingly accessible despite its elevated mission. The press release describes strains of shoegaze, dream pop, anthemic rock, Chicago post-rock, and second-wave emo running through the album.
Sewn Back Together was shortlisted for Canada’s prestigious Polaris Prize last year, along with BNB alumni (issue #1!) and fellow First Nations group Snotty Nose Rez Kids, but lost to Pierre Kwenders’ José Louis and the Paradox of Love. Maybe because “Pierre Kwenders” is easier to say than “Ombiigizi”?
S Y Z Y G Y X
Pronounced “siss-eh-jix”
Luna Blanc looked to the sky when naming her synth project, or at least that’s what I’m guessing from the explanation on her website.
Merriam-Webster gets specific, saying syzygy is “the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system.”
Speaking of straight lines, you can draw one from the Human League to S Y Z Y G Y X on 2019’s Is That All There Is.
Back then, S Y Z Y G Y X consisted of Blanc and co-founder Josh Clark. They met while working retail, quickly became a couple and then bandmates according to this tender bio Blanc wrote in 2018.
Clark had toured fairly extensively with drum ’n’ bass trio Sinthetix around the turn of the millennium, but fell into a heroin addiction that derailed his music career. Although he’d sworn off music after that, he returned after meeting Blanc.
I have learned everything I know thanks to Josh. To love deeply, and to make music, I understand music so well now. He is still my hero, and I am his muse. And so, S Y Z Y G Y X was born.
It wouldn’t last. S Y Z Y G Y X became Blanc’s solo project, and in 2021 she released (Im)Mortal, which can be read as both “immortal” and “I’m mortal.” She wrote on Bandcamp:
Since I was a kid, I always struggled with the concept of mortality, not as a body, but as a person, as an artist. Once I started studying the lives of long gone artists I realized they were still alive, through their art. I believe art transcends human life.
It would be sadly prescient: Clark died suddenly in October 2022. Although Blanc hadn’t been in regular contact with him, it understandably wrecked her. She spoke about his living on through his art in this emotional Instagram video.
Right, Band Name Bureau is supposed to be fun. Hey, we’ll always have “Felching Filth,” guys.
The Anthema Xxhe
Pronounced: the Anthema ???
Google is pretty sure this group doesn’t exist. “You must be looking for the Anthem D.C., a music venue.” Nope. “Oh, then you must be looking for insufferable indie duo She & Him.” No, and that’s weird editorializing. “Hmm, maybe a 2018 story about a woman who tried to make Canada’s national anthem gender neutral?” Forget it, Google.
Add the all-important quotation marks, and Google finally figures out I’m seeking the “experimental and new age ambient musical project originating from the convent art house in San Francisco CA.”
To be fair to our friends in Mountain View, Anthema Xxhe barely exists: a Bandcamp with a single 10-minute track and a video on an unaffiliated YouTube account are all there is. (Description: “very interesting effects and mindful music.” Way to sell it, Jourgensen Productions!)
The group sort of has an Instagram account, but it appears to be the personal one of violinist Ariel Corbo, and it’s full of memes inscrutable to an old person like myself:
All of this is a long way of saying a) I don’t know where the name comes from, and b) I don’t know how to pronounce it.
NxxxxxS
Pronounced: N-Five X-S
Both NxxxxxS and BNB alumnus I Hate Models are DJ-producers who hail from France and like to obscure their faces in photos. Whereas I Hate Models has the über-French name Guillaume Labadie—just saying it makes a baguette appear—NxxxxxS would prefer we not know his, thanks.
Or the origins of his moniker, for that matter. NxxxxxS doesn’t do much in the way of interviews, preferring to let songs like, uh, “Mosh O’Clock” speak for themselves.
POST-SCRIPTS
There’s a musician named Cameron Boggs whose Instagram bio begins with “Jesus Praiser.” Turns out this isn’t the non-binary death-metal guitarist who wrote “Perverse/Deranged!”
Speaking of Twitter, I’ve hardly been on it since my A.V. Club days and have barely tended to the BNB account. Both it and @Kyle_Ryan are gonna be mothballed. I’ll set up a Notes account for BNB, then probably ignore it. #engagement