Having long established themselves as a band drawn to grindcore by restless curiosity as much as dark fury last year Full of Hell continued to push out their sound on stunning collaborative releases with sludge-noise greats Primitive Man and bleak shoegazers Nothing. This produced two quite different but equally excellent albums arriving either end of the year. In between they also managed to squeeze in a split with power violence heroes Gasp for which they delivered two head-frying, long form weird outs. Shorter than that four track split EP Coagulated Bliss sees a return to fierce brevity, packing fistfuls of minute and a half long tracks into less than half an hour.
The opening trio blurs past, ‘Half Life Of Changelings’ scattering shards of surprisingly bright guitar over the grind rush and ‘Transmuting Chemical Burns’ twisting hardcore shapes in a knot. Dragging the pace to a chug ‘Doors to Mental Agony’ offers a potted shot of the album’s diversity, ascending through a run of changes to a blasting finish. The title track is another absolute ripper, noise punk meets grind and if you can’t quite sing along it does show off their mastery of space and dynamics within a very hectic sound.
It’s on ‘Fractured Bonds to Mecca’ they really start to expand the palette, drum machines sparring with David Bland’s beats, a propulsive bass line from Samuel DiGristine and more space for chunks of weird electronic noise. Dragging the vicious dead beat ‘Gelding of Men’ rolls in noise rock agony, a single chord brutally driven into the ground with that ugly early Swans energy. I can’t make out the words from Dylan Walker’s caustic screams but I’m guessing it takes on the current vogue for wounded masculinity, it certainly sounds like it. Bucking the whole brevity thing, the lengthy and churning ‘Bleeding Horizon’ slows right down to quarter pace with a drone intro as long as most of the album’s other tracks.
As if they feel they’ve over indulged slightly it’s then back to compact ragers with titles that sound like two word descriptions – ‘Vomiting Glass’, ‘Schizoid Rupture’, ‘Vacuous Dose’, ‘Gasping Dust’. Actually, it sounds like a ‘four bands for £5’ bill I would most likely attend. Again, it isn’t just blast beats on parade and Spencer Hazard seems to be particularly enjoying himself on ‘Vacuous Dose’ with a looping, widdling guitar part and an almost classic rock riff.
They’ve brought what they learned from collaborations into their own sound, skilfully crunching, chewing and otherwise compacting those lessons into clearer and more varied lumps of dark sonic gristle. It’s not a genre shuffle, it’s wholly absorbed, a richer sonic sludge. There’s variety, and still plenty of ferocity. A variety of ferocity, if you will. Coagulated Bliss is perhaps the most fully Full of Hell album yet, sharper edged and full of surprises. Album closer ‘Malformed Ligature’ is (almost) a three minute rock song, with an epic sway about it ending on a pensive saxophone coda from Samuel DiGristine. The sound of curdled happiness.
