Album Review — Babe’s Faves: ohGr’s Devils In My Details (2008)

What better way to kick off this account and the plans that I have for it than with a writeup about my favorite album of all time, ohGr’s Devils in my Details?

To be entirely honest, this album single handedly has been the obstruction that has kept me from becoming any sort of music reviewer, because I find myself constantly coming back to it, painfully aware that I have no choice but to make it the first album I ever officially review, but at an utter loss for how to put my feelings about it into words, which is really quite frustrating for someone who has made a career out of writing, as well as just engaging with the English language in general.

This is an album that I have wanted to write some kind of review on for years, since it first really jumped out at me. And I guess, realistically, I can start there — Let you know right off the bat how heavy of a bias I have when it comes to this complete masterpiece of an album.

I’ve been a fan of ohGr, and everything Nivek Ogre has laid his paws on, for years. But admittedly, in the beginning, Devils in my Details was actually the album that stuck out the least to me. I still remember listening to it for the first time; I was excited, because I knew that Bill Moseley was on it, and what self-respecting horror fan doesn’t adore Bill Moseley? But I don’t think I even ended up finishing it my first time through. It wasn’t aggressive dislike or anything, I just got bored and switched to music that I felt was more exciting. Ogre’s vocals were mixed oddly, distorted even more than usual (which is saying something!) and then smothered beneath layers of sounds that made him hard to make out against the industrial noise surrounding it. Short, strange songs with unfamiliar and patently un-ohGr sounds were peppered between longer tracks that were equally bizarre to me. Bill Moseley’s spoken word narration appeared at random, more comprehensible due to cleaner mixing but equally incomprehensible in meaning. I struggled with it, and was initially disappointed by it, although I could recognize the talent in certain songs that I would occasionally put on if I had already listened my way through the rest of the ohGr discography but was in a stubbornly ohGrish mood.

I think the one thing I really recognized and appreciated about it from the get-go was the fact that it was one, single, continuous piece of music throughout the entire forty-two minute playtime, segmented only to break up different songs but with no actual pause (unless one is playing on a device that doesn’t allow immediate transition and requires a moment of loading, in which case the abrupt silence in between tracks makes the intended continuity even more noticeable).

This will sound dramatic, but bare with me here. What propelled Devils in my Details to the top of not only ohGr’s discography but music in general was actually a near-death experience.

In late summer/early fall of 2017 I suffered a massive heatstroke. Backstory is relatively unimportant, but the simple details are as follows: Fall 2017 was going to be my time. I had just gotten hired at a new job, it was the start of my last school year before graduation, and I had been training for my first marathon. I had signed up for a half marathon (my second half marathon) as part of training, and got sick with a minor flu the night before. I decided to try to run the damn thing anyway. I figured I wasn’t going to let a little bug get me down! Well… Wrong choice. Maybe. At the start of the thirteenth mile, I dropped, unconscious. I woke up in the intensive care unit after being unresponsive for a good five or six hours, with no memory of the day (it came back to me over the course of the night). I was kept in ICU until the following afternoon, which was a Sunday.

It’s worth noting that it had also been the last weekend before the beginning of the new school year, and, as I had just been hired by the campus as a tutor over the summer, it was also the day before my first day of work at my new job.

Long story short (too late?), It was a hard few weeks.

I spent the first week out of ICU going back to the doctor, day after day, to be pumped full of fluids. Something something something about poison in my bloodstream and trying to get it out. No one really told me much about what was going on with my own body, I think to stop me from being scared. I got some of the worst grades I’ve ever received in school (I was, and have always been, an almost perfect straight-A student, for context). I didn’t want to risk losing the job I had been so excited to get, so I showed up each day, acting like nothing was wrong and refusing to tell anyone there what I had gone through. I had to cancel the marathon, which had been scheduled for late October, because I definitely wasn’t going to be good to run before that. And that’s not getting into the layers of emotions I was going through — I was embarrassed, ashamed, confused, scared, frustrated, and a whole plethora of other negative emotions.

Sleeping at night was extremely difficult. I cried myself to sleep on a few nights. I pissed the bed once, which was absolutely humiliating. I had strange, chaotic, erratic dreams, full of weird and incoherent imagery that was so vivid that it would wake me up with a start and I could hardly remember where I was or what was going on. I’m no stranger to weird dreams, but I’ve never had dreams like that before and I’ve never had them like that again.

There was one specific thing I held onto throughout all of this, though, which was that, earlier that year, I had bought tickets to actually see ohGr live for the first time at the end of October (originally planned the weekend after the now-cancelled marathon), and I was totally ecstatic for that and hanging onto the excitement that the upcoming concert brought to me through everything.

So, needless to say, I was listening to a lot of Ogre, but Devils in my Details was still probably getting the least amount of playtime. Until one particular night, when I woke up from one of my many strange and vivid dreams with, to my surprise, a song from Devils in my Details stuck in my head. The song in question was “Pepper,” which I had previously categorized as one of the many “short, strange songs” that I hadn’t been able to quite understand. I was surprised to even be thinking about it now, but I decided to trust my half-conscious, working-through-trauma self’s instinct and put the song on, which led to me putting the album on from the beginning, which opened me up to an entirely new perspective of the album that not only changed my opinion of it entirely, but made a huge mark on how I feel about music to this very day.

This is a long and winding story, and I’m sure it feels gratuitous to some, but I do feel that these details are important, because what I tapped into when I revisited Devils in my Details during that time is what I believe to be the core essence of the album: Trauma. It’s a cry for help, for understanding, for solace. It’s a need for someone, anyone, to hear your voice through the pain and it’s an incredibly dark piece that explores the deepest, darkest corners of a mind wrought with trauma and trying to come to terms with it.

I’ll get into the review of the album itself now, but this is not the end of my story. Hang in there.

Devils in my Details’ sound is unique for both an ohGr album and for an album in general. Ogre and Mark Walk really outdid themselves on the experimentation with this one. I think it’s the experimental nature of the album’s sound that tends to make this album generally more polarizing for fans — From my experience, you either are extremely neutral on it (or straight up dislike it), you consider it the worst of ohGr’s discography, or you’re a ranting and raving lunatic like me, who talks about this album like it’s damn near religious. If I were to suggest the most defining features of this album, I would say it’s the way that the mixing leads to Ogre’s vocals blending in at the same volume level as the instrumentation, and the continuity of the album as one long, single piece (both of these points have already been mentioned), rather than individual songs. Although the individual tracks are outstanding, I almost would not recommend someone to listen to them individually, at least not at first. I think Devils in my Details is worth approaching as a single piece of art; engaging with it as you would a film, in a single viewing or listen from beginning to end, is probably a better way to digest it.

Devils in my Details is comprised of eleven tracks:

1. Shhh

2. Eyecandy

3. Three

4. Feelin’ Chicken

5. Pepper

6. D.Angel

7. Psychoreal

8. Whitevan

9. Timebomb

10. Smogharp

11. Witness

Avid ohGr fans will most likely recognize right away the deviation from the norm here, which is that this album’s songs lack the name style present in any other ohGr album, sacrificing the fun capitalization, puns, and unique spellings seen in titles such as “lusiD,” “soloW,” “suhleap,” “HiLo,” “maJiK,” “WaTergaTe,” etc. Later albums (UnDeveloped and TrickS) would both return to a similar naming pattern, leaving Devils in my Details sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the five ohGr albums in existence. This alone sets a mood, something a bit more toned down, more direct, without the flare and eye for aesthetic and play that came before or would come after.

“Shhh” also sets the tone right away and indicates in an instant how very different of a journey Devils in my Details is about to take its listener on in comparison to something like the infamously more poppy and toned down or dancey weLt or SunnyPsyOp. We have something grittier, rougher, more chaotic in its sound and more layered in static and abrasive harshness, with those distorted, muffled vocals, that will drill through the heart of the album. Ogre’s vocal style is more aggressive than previous ohGr ventures, I’ve seen people compare the sound as something more akin to classic Skinny Puppy than anything he’s done more recently, and while I hesitate to say it sounds that similar to, say, something like Too Dark Park or VIVIsectVI, it certainly is somewhere closer to that than the vocal stylings of SunnyPsyOp, Bedside Toxicology, or even the majority of the sounds from post-breakup Skinny Puppy.

The lyrics are equally aggressive, although Ogre as well as the ohGr project is no stranger to anger and negativity permeating through the the work, the instant tone set by the words of Devils in my Details’ opening track seeps frustration and pessimism, with Ogre’s loud refrain of “Sounds like shit!” I’d say that frustration is the driving emotion through this song, with the repeating “Every time I…” lament that opens each verse.

As the track ends, we get a little bit of Bill Moseley spoken word poetry, garbled to the point of near-incomprehensibility… And just like that, we’re whisked off to “Eyecandy,” which is one of the most demented songs ohGr has ever put out, and if “Shhh” started us off down a darker track, “Eyecandy” derails us altogether and sends us tumbling down a dark and endless abyss. From Bill’s grimy, sex-dipped opening poetry about “porno chicks” to Ogre’s lyrics to the sound and atmosphere of the song, this one is nasty, rough, and raw. I interpret this song to be about… bad coping mechanisms and pornography (and the intersection of those two things), to put it in simplest terms. “It seems like it is all alive / I feel like I’m about to die / And now I’m looking deep inside / And now it may keep me alive,” Ogre sing-chants before breaking into dry heaving laughter that’s both maniacal and mechanical. Ogre has, in the past, discussed in both song lyrics and interview a fascination with porn that has at times (according to himself) slipped into something like an addiction, and if previous songs such as Bedside Toxicology’s “Imago” are to be believed, it’s a topic that specifically seems to come around for him during darker times; he seems to correlate it with loneliness, hopelessness, and pain in his songs. It comes as no surprise, then, that a song like “Eyecandy,” a song about desperately clinging to a twisted, distorted form of love in an attempt to cling to something at all, would appear so early on in an album like this.

“Three” comes and goes quickly, sounding like the deranged, frenzied, and repetitive rambling that gets louder as it goes. I would almost call this something of a transitional song, a middle piece between two moods that connects them and moves the “story” along. A decent amount of the track is strange soundscape instrumentation that slowly transitions into the track that comes immediately after…

…And then we’re thrown into “Feelin’ Chicken,” which is a demented little nursery-rhyme ditty full of unsolveable puzzles, with some nihilistic lyrics about politics as Ogre laments about the strangeness and lack of order in the world. Bill Moseley’s famous “You’re killing me with bacon, America!” bites through the noise as the song opens, a relatively coherent piece about racism, homophobia, imperialism, and the economy. And of course, the fact that Ogre has devoted his life to animal rights activism and clean eating shouldn’t be lost when the song is so keen on relating to meat animals, like chickens and pigs. “What if the world is shit?” Ogre repeats. When one undergoes a life-altering trauma, it grows from the inside out, and the anger and confusion you hold expands to the whole of the world. You become aware of how unfair and cruelly nonsensical the world is, and how helpless you are within it, not unlike a chicken or a pig being kept for slaughter.

“Feelin’ Chicken” transitions seamlessly into “Pepper,” which is probably my favorite song on the album, largely for… all of the reasons mentioned previously: It stuck with me and resonated with me deeply then, and I honestly think it has one of the most clever progressions in any song I’ve ever heard. “Pepper” is a song about dualities. The recurring theme of a connection to nature is broken through by an undercurrent of loud city traffic, and Ogre’s voice is broken into two in a sort of twisted monologue back and forth, as one half of him sings softly, “I really want to fix it,” while the other bites back in an aggressive snarl, “Go away!” The way I hear it, this song is about looking around you at the debris and rubble during the aftermath of a disaster and being torn, painfully, between trying to move on, or fix what broke, and not knowing how the hell to do either when you’re so filled with fear and anger and hurt. And in a moment of hope in an otherwise hopeless album, I love the fact that the last line of the song ends on what I would call a genuinely hopeful note, “Tomorrow, I’ll give up / But today…” A thoughtful sentiment that, perhaps, even if tomorrow is dismally unpredictable, at least we have now. Of course, this song, jarring against others, is one of the few that breaks the continuity and ends rather abruptly, leaving a bit of lingering doubt, but the determination to continue forward is striking.

Especially compared to the song that comes directly after, “D.Angel.” This track sits directly in the middle of the album, marking the halfway point. The shortest track on the album and another that feels almost transitional, as the darkest hour is still yet to come and the uncertainty of “Pepper” is about to make way for a frenzied, anxious panic. This is a frantic track that sounds to me like a rapidly-beating heart, a person running for their life. There’s a sort of paranoid, delusional psychosis seeping through the lyrics of this song. “Open your eyes / Everything’s dangerous,” Ogre whispers out as the song begins as abruptly as “Pepper” ended, practically interrupting the hopeful note left in the former with the much more sinister, damning statement. Ogre remarks on devils and angels and feeling like he’s being hunted down like a rabid dog. Similarly to my comments about “Feelin’ Chicken,” I think it’s worth remembering the empathy that Ogre has always extended to dogs, and it is also worth noting that Ogre around this time adopted a blind, sick dog who was the initial inspiration for the album (more on that later). “D.Angel” is focused on the feelings of weakness, helplessness, and the undercurrent of panic and fear that such weakness and helplessness bring.

The theme of the psyche and psychosis continues on with the song that follows, “Psychoreal.” This is another loud, pounding, aggressive song, with similar religious themes to “D.Angel” — maybe even religious delusion? — throughout, but this time it’s a loud, repeated proclamation of “You can be my God — Psychoreality.” Psychoreal/Psychoreality are, of course, made-up Ogre words. Considering “psycho” refers to the mind, I would guess the idea is that this is the reality made by the brain, especially the reality made out of trauma. Of course, Ogre’s always full of puns, and the word “psycho” itself, in its modern meaning (you know, like Hitchcock?) isn’t to be missed, hence my recurring reference to psychosis and delusion as well. Bill has some poetry here, the first of his in a few songs. This is a wickedly clever piece that always makes me smile; it’s very reminiscent of some of his Cornbugs stuff.

Can I be honest for a moment? The next song on the album, “Whitevan,” continues to stump me. After all this time, even as I refer to Devils in my Details as my all time favorite album, I’m… actually still not fully able to conceptualize “Whitevan.” It is, easily, one of the most striking, unique, bizarre, and creepy songs on the album. Ogre uses a vocal distortion that he’s never used before and never uses again; he certainly seems to be crafting a character for us, as he’s done before as well (Skinny Puppy’s “Brownstone” being another example). I’ve taken to looking at other people’s interpretations, and they vary hugely. Shadow governments? Capitalist societies that work people to death? Child kidnapping? White supremacy? The Devil himself? All of the above? Something to do with corruption in society, I would say, but admittedly, I don’t necessarily know what to do with this song, although it’s a joy to listen to and I think it mixes up the sound of the album quite nicely. The final bit, though, when Ogre drops the vocal distortion and resumes typical Ogre lyrics rather than the strange character he’s introduced us to, feels like another major turning point in the album, as the delusional rambling of earlier tracks culminates with a depressing and nihilistic conclusion: Nothing really exists, “Each of us must face their fate.”

“Timebomb” seems to be one of the more popular tracks on the album, and I think it might arguably be the most classically ohGr. It’s a bit more upbeat and danceable in its sound and has a more coherent melody and chorus than I think a lot of the songs surrounding it. It is a fun song, and the lyrics are fun too. Ogre has said before that this one is about addiction, and it’s pretty damn obvious with the amount of drug references throughout, alongside one of the few samples throughout the album, which is taken from an antidrug film. But, what I think makes this song stand out is the lyrics, which I believe are spoken by addiction itself, or perhaps by the substance which is causing addiction. This is more or less stated explicitly when the speaker “introduces” itself in the opening line, and the opening verse is written more or less like a demented cigarette ad, and ending with the threatening: “I’ve dealt with billions / Of your resilience / Come on and let me out.” I would argue that beyond just addiction, this song is about relapsing, or trying not to relapse, about the conversation between you, the addict or the past addict, and the drugs and the addiction tempting you to return.

Two songs left: “Smogharp” and “Witness.” The former, “Smogharp,” is another one of the shorter ones, and this one’s shift in emotion, especially directly after the more upbeat “Timebomb,” is immediately noticeable. There’s a somber tranquility here, low, reverberating synths and deep, throbbing chimes, like the quiet ringing of a bell in the silence of night. It’s dreamlike and melancholy, both magical and sobering. Bill Moseley introduces us to this change of tone with a single sentence, both whimsical and bleak: “And in the spider’s belly, the bones of the butterfly,” followed by Ogre’s quiet, whispering lyrics, as he tells us at the crux of the song: “Nothing lasts forever.” It’s a quiet song about pain, loss, and acceptance, but whether what’s been accepted was necessarily a good thing is for you to decide…

Which brings us to “Witness,” the final song on the album and, in my opinion, quite honestly one of the most depressing songs that Ogre has ever written. And yes, I know that’s really saying something. But “Witness” is, truly, one of the most overtly nihilistic, hopeless, and desolate songs that I can think of. It’s a cry for help, for understanding. It’s the desperation to simply be witnessed amidst the pain and the suffering. And as the song transitions into its second part, the refrain becomes, “You gotta make your money and die.” That’s it, huh? This album has been an exploration and a journey through the mind of one who has just undergone some sort of trauma or devastation. The ups and downs, the manic frenzy and the depressive lows, relapsing into old habits, being split in two as you try to move forward… and the final note the album ends on is a begging to simply be seen as you come to the conclusion that this is the way that the world works. You make your money and die. It’s a helpless, lonely song, and it’s one that admittedly haunts me, although there have been many times where it has also been exactly what I needed to hear. After all, in a bit of meta irony, by releasing this album out into the world, Ogre has done exactly what it is he’s requesting, and made it possible for others to witness him and his pain and relate to it through their own past and present suffering.

In a decision that gives me chills every time I hear it to this day, as the album winds down, it ends exactly where it began: “Witness” winds down into nothing but noise, and the little bit of spoken word from Bill Moseley at the very end of “Shhh” returns, piercing through the sound and resuming exactly where it left off. We get a beautiful piece of final poetry, calm and somber, implicating a goodbye as Bill tells us, “The road is calling me.” Then, through the very last line, just as it sounds like he’s about to return once more to something explicitly sexual, the album ends. The last thing we hear is “Children crying / People dying on the street / And me, suck-” Mid-sentence, mid-word, just like that. It’s a striking double-subversion, the repetition as the album seems to be implying a cycle and then cutting itself off just as suddenly in an ending so abrupt it’s initially hard to even understand what just happened.

Now that I’ve gone through the album a bit, I want to rewind back to my initial point about what the album is about as a whole. Around the time of Devils in my Details’ release, Ogre actually talked quite a bit in various interviews about some of the background for the album’s creation. He’s been vague, but the singular consistency throughout any interview where the album’s creation has come up is that it was an urgent response to something traumatic and very personal that happened to him. You can traverse across the internet and find plenty of sources on this, but I’ll quote one where Ogre puts it nice and concisely:

“Well, [Devils in my Details] happened out of a sense of urgency, actually. We had planned on doing a record but the concept of the record was, the original working title was Blurry dotted I’s, had to do with this dog I was telling you about that I had found and was blind. … the idea [was] that a lot of rescue animals when you first see them look like monsters, but with a bit of care this dog has turned out to be, I can’t believe how beautiful, how incredible she is, how loyal and sweet…It just took a bit of care, a change in diet or simple things like that, and a lot of these animals are euthanized right away. So it was going to be that direction and then something happened in my life that was very profound and had a huge affect on me personally, and at that point everything had shifted. And we started in a therapeutic way kind of working on the idea like jamming to find a direction, find a picture and pulling stuff off the internet to find stuff. This was starting to turn into more of a concept and it became something that, had I not had someone like Mark Walk to work with, I wouldn’t have kind of transcended what I feel I’ve done in the past in a lot of ways and have come really close to actually bringing the experience I had to life, in a lot of ways. For myself, anyway, and hopefully for the listener because and was a lot of fun to do. This album was more out of a sense of urgency.” [Source: “Devil Details from an Ogre’s perspective; interview with Nivek Ogre,” via Unrated Magazine, conducted by Jackie Lee King]

There’s a lot that could be said about that, I could probably break down this quote in a writeup as long as this one, and I won’t do that, but I do want to emphasize the fact that I, as a listener while going through the recovery of my own trauma, did not know that this was the background for this album. I didn’t know that Ogre had laced his own traumas through this album, that it had been made with the same sort of pain that I had felt when it had spoken to me (well, not the same, I certainly don’t want to sound like I can perfectly relate to Ogre’s own personal journey and from what I can tell he has never openly discussed what his particular situation was that led to this album’s development… but you know what I mean). And I find that kind of incredible, that what Ogre and Mark Walk were able to capture through this album was able to resonate with somebody completely free of the awareness of the behind the scenes reality.

Of course, I’m sure that there is more going on in Devils in my Details than just the personal. Like any Ogre work, Skinny Puppy and ohGr and anything else he’s been involved with, there’s politics, there’s issues bigger than himself or any single person, and I by no means am interested in positing myself as the singular holder of the knowledge of what each and every song, or the album as a whole, is about. After all, as I just said, I’m not in Ogre’s mind and I can’t begin to speak for him, and I’m well aware that the album is layered with all sorts of puns, references, puzzles, and secrets. Devils in the details, as they say. But that’s part of the beauty of any album, and Devils in my Details in particular. It’s layered, it’s complicated, it merges the larger issues of the world with something much more intimate and singular, which is something that I would argue has been happening in Ogre’s lyrical work since the early days of Skinny Puppy, when Ogre stood up on stage during the VIVIsectVI tour and slowly transitioned from vivisecting a dog to vivisecting himself. We’re all connected, our traumas and struggles all interconnect and shape the world, for better and for worse.

Devils in my Details is messy. It’s rough and confusing, it’s a difficult listen that can be hard to access or extrapolate meaning from. I can see why, for many, it’s one of the least accessible ohGr albums. But to me, it embodies the spirit of industrial music and fully captures the magic of the genre and everything that Ogre has worked towards as a musician throughout his many decades of artistic creation. It’s experimental, it’s weird, it’s able to simultaneously be both fun and deeply desolate. It’s a baring of the soul and all of the darkness within it in an attempt to reach out to others, to connect through shared pain, to find others who can witness your suffering as well as find solace and comfort in their own suffering. It criticizes the state of the world, it empathizes with the suffering of animals. It’s a cry to bring people together, a cry to be heard, an experimental exploration of darkness that ends with connection amongst those who rarely have a voice. It’s an experience that very few other albums can come close to achieving for me.

To circle back around, I’ll finish my story with this: A few weeks into recovery, Ogre announced the VIP package for the tour I would be attending, and I was able to meet him for the first time and thank him for everything he’s done for me, which was an incredible experience that I will absolutely cherish for the rest of my life. The weeks between buying the VIP tickets and attending the actual concert coincided with the rest of my recovery and I was able to find something to hold onto with hope and excitement for the future, and I had a tangible way to give back to the man who had done so much for me then and so many times before. And Ogre is an absolute angel and one of the kindest men I’ve ever had the chance to meet — as is the rest of the ohGr crew. It was a fitting conclusion to an extremely rough spot in my life, and Devils in my Details was a hugely defining factor in that entire period of time for me. And that truly speaks to the essence of the album. This album revealed to me a whole other level of fan engagement with an artist’s work; it elevated the very idea of art as a conversation between creator and consumer, and it showed to me how meaningful albums that border somewhere between concept album and not are to me. I adore albums that are a bit less coherent than a fully continuous concept or story, but are still able to be a coherent and interconnected piece. It’s an album that speaks to pain and darkness, that calls to any who need to hear it as they work through the messy devils in their own details. Truly, for me, nothing else can quite compare.

Album Personnel:

Nivek Ogre — Voice, Keyboards, Synthesizers

Mark Walk — Guitar, Bass Guitar, Drums

Bill Moseley — Poetry/Spoken Word

You can support ohGr by buying the album through Amazon, Apple Music, or pretty much anywhere you can buy an album online, and you can also listen to it on the official ohGr Youtube here. It’s also available on Spotify, though I always recommend purchasing albums and supporting artists when possible. The official ohGr Bandcamp, though lacking Devils In My Details, can be found here, and ohGr can be found across social media on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.