Full of Hell are never where you expect them. The Maryland-based grindcore outfit released no less than three records last year, none of them entirely their own: collaborations with doom metal titans Primitive Man and the darkest shoegaze band you’ve ever heard Nothing and a split with Gasp, a band with a sound I could not possibly describe. Already furious and chaotic, Full of Hell felt restless and mutating into a nameless entity of confrontational, forward-thinking music.
That feeling was right because the new and improved Full of Hell has arrived with Coagulated Bliss, twelve songs and twenty-something minutes of laser focused face-melting intensity. It’ll be out April 26th via Closed Casket Activities, but start bracing yourselves for impact already.
Right off the bat, the opener Half Life of Changeling starts with an oddly melodic riff before transitioning to a straight blasting minute of pure, unbridled grindcore. There’s pulsating, breathless quality to it. It harnesses this primordial chaos Full of Hell have always been so good at tapping into. The follow-up is the first single Doors to Mental Agony, which is perhaps the catchiest song the band’s ever recorded? Starting off a catchy, bouncy riff, it explodes into a fragmented, sometimes dissonant, sometimes weirdly melodic ode to dead friends interpreted by a fiery, inspired Dylan Walker. The fleeting catchier moments and Walker’s heartbroken fury create an unlikely, but overwhelming sense of melancholy. It’s already one of my favorite songs from them. It’s so vibrant with pain and fragile memories
Bassman Sam DiGristine was telling me that main songwriter Spencer Hazard was into Sonic Youth and The Melvins a lot while writing Coagulated Bliss and I thought it showed a lot on Transmuting Chemical Burns with the muddled guitars and these catchy-ass riffs. These songs are so catchy and focused on this new record. Transmuting Chemical Burns also reminded me of old school, Bleach era Nirvana. Although Hazard has maintained the band’s shapeshifting fury, these new songs have a blissful and contagious simplicity to them. Fractured Bonds to Mecca is another piece that acknowledges these influences with its predatory, mid-tempo meandering guitars and ghoulish industrial samples. It’s loaded with a dreadful atmosphere. The title song is another punk rock influenced scorcher lead by an otherworldly performance by Dylan Walker and a vague sense of déjà vu evoked by the main riff, like you’re in a nightmare where you’re experiencing a distorted version of a fading memory.
Bleeding Horizon is an outlying, six-minutes long feedback drenched crusher not unlike what the band has done on the collaborative record with Nothing Where No Birds Sang. It’s much darker and hopeless in tone, but I love the way it lingers and leans into the chords with authority. It’s percussive. I also love the way it picks up into something more cohesive in the last 90 seconds or so and ends into quietly strummed bass notes. Bleeding Horizon vibrates with pain and unresolved conflict. It’s not going to please every Full of Hell fan, though. It’s on the atmospheric side. The awesomely named Vomiting Glass is closer to a traditional Full of Hell song than most of what’s on this new record, but it does stand out through its acrobatic, somewhat surf rock guitar riffing. It’s also the shortest song on Coagulated Bliss at only 56 seconds.
Schizoid Rupture features this fun double vocals by Dylan Walker and Sam DiGristine who’s gutturals are quite iconic from his work with Jarhead Fertilizer. Both men are surfing this fun, proggy guitar riffs and syncopated drums to create a tense atmosphere of inner conflict and mental fragility. It’s quite the anxiety-inducing number. Vacuous Dose is carried from the get go by this fucking hellbound performance by Dylan Walker who sounds like a demon picking porcupine quills off his feet. I have no fucking idea what he’s saying on the song, but his vocals are so emotional and tormented, it’s hard not to intuitively feel the nastiness that inhabits him on that song.
The second single from Coagulated Bliss Gasping Dust features Ross Dolan from iconic New York death metal band Immolation. His underworld prince growls are quite efficient at creating texture and dread. The song’s good. Perhaps not as good as the high points on the record, but Dolan’s contribution alone makes it worth hearing. It’s a great song to help you appreciate the nuance of his game. Gelding of Men is another offputting, dissonant, mid-tempo, Melvins-inspired percussive exorcism of a song. Full of Hell uses sampling in a less expansive way on Coagulated Bliss, but they always bring something pertinent to every song. I love how the swirling airwaves at the end of this one enhanced the confusion and the sweeping blankness such a pounding of a song is supposed to produce.
The closer Malformed Ligature is the second longest song on Coagulated Bliss at a mere 3:35. It’s driven by a tortured melody and seesaw grooves that perverts the idea of the hero walking into the sunset at the end of the movie. It ends on a fitting mournful saxophone, off-tune saxophone melody played by Sam DiGristine. At the end, nothing remains but silence.
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Coagulated Bliss is one of the best, if not the best Full of Hell record to date. It is certainly the best thing they’ve recorded since Trumpeting Ecstasy in 2017. While the band kept its contagious, shapeshifting fury, it has gained a referential melancholy that a band can only gain through loss and maturity. Coagulated Bliss is an album filled with regrets, heartbreak and haunting mistakes. You can hear it in their sound, but you can hear it in how you hear this album too. I love every song on this record. Full of Hell have achieved their new form. It’s probably not their last, but it’s as exciting as it was unexpected. Let it wash over you. Get angry. Cry. Feel nothing but the airwaves cleansing out your sins. It’s a wonderful and fearsome experience.
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