One of the most difficult metal bands to discuss is Full of Hell. The best simile I’ve found to describe them is “a shapeshifting beast.” They don’t have “a sound” to properly speak of. Full of Hell has all the sounds: hardcore punk, grindcore, powerviolence, death metal, noise, the Maryland quintet has been surfing all kinds of extremes for almost fifteen years now. But it only gets more eclectic and muddied once you start going over their collaborative records.
According to Metal Archives, they have eight of these. They are not splits, which are a common, cost cutting practice in extreme metal. No, Full of Hell write collaborative records with a wide array of artists ranging from noise legend Merzbow to experimental rock weirdos Health. Whenever they do this, they tend to take their collaborator’s colour and blend within their creative paradigm. This time, Full of Hell teamed up with shoegaze legends Nothing in order to give us, once again, something that can’t possibly be described.
It’s called When No Birds Sang and I’ll try my best to tell you why you should listen to it. Because it’s pretty fucking great even if it sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard.
When No Birds Sang is a six song EP featuring about thirty minutes of music, including a whopping eight minutes-long opener titled Rose Tinted World. Not that I want to dismiss the other songs, but Rose Tinted World is the heart and soul of When No Birds Sang. It’s a sludgy, screechy, dissonant midtempo scorcher that eventually collapses into a quiet atmospheric segment where you can hear news bulletins over spacey, gentle guitar strums. The layering is so unlikely that it creates somewhat of an apocalyptic feel that only gets enhanced by the proliferation of newscaster voices that multiply until the song ends in total cacophony. It’s a super anxiety inducing song that never veers into melodrama or cringe like apocalyptic songs tend to do.
The second song Like Stars in the Firmament is a straight shoegaze ballad. If you’re already familiar with Nothing’s catalog, you won’t be caught off guard. The guitar lingers in the air from note to note, creating this rich, thick atmosphere. Nicky Palermo and Doyle Martin croon so gently, it’s almost a whisper. I believe the Full of Hell contribution is the layer of synth in the background that contributes to the feeling of fullness the song provides. It was the second single from When No Birds Sang, so I’m sure plenty of metalheads frowned upon the simplicity of the song, but these hypothetical people would be missing the point. It’s a preapocalyptic mood piece, like time rewinded after Rose Tinted World. It’s surreal and serene in a fatalistic way.
Spend the Grace is the most openly emotional song on the record. It’s a particularly fun one because it features Dylan Walker performing on Nothing’s Nicky Palermo and Doyle Martin’s instrumentals and, not gonna lie, their creative paradigms blend much better than I thought they would. Walker’s shrieks bring a theatricality and a sense of urgency that Nothing’s music might not have otherwise and Nothing brings Walker an emotional nuance it might not benefit from otherwise. I wouldn’t call it screamo or anything like this (it would be factually wrong to do so), but Palermo and Martin’s brittle, cristalline instrumentation on Spend the Grace grant an interiority to Walker’s performance that would be unreachable for a straightforward metal song.
I’m not going to analyze the rest of this record in details here because I believe the three other songs act as a sonic gateway between Rose Tinted World, Like Stars in the Firmament and the closer Spend the Grace and these songs are better experienced than deconstructed, but know this: the interest of mixing the creative paradigms of Full of Hell and Nothing lies in incorporating the abrasiveness and the noise elements from the former with the more harmonic and atmospheric approach of the ladder and it totally works. In accordance with Full of Hell collaborative records approach, we’re very much in the esoteric realm of Nothing more than we are into Full of Hell’s face smashing grindcore, but the result is unique and haunting and I believe it was designed to be so.
If you like Full of Hell’s records, When No Birds Sang is totally going to throw you off like, I’m sure, all of their collaborative records have thrown you off because it’s this band’s life mission to do so. If you like Full of Hell the way I do and enjoy unlikely musical adventures, you’re going to find here soundscapes that shouldn’t technically work, but that gorgeously do. It’s not a technical record. It’s not an aggressive record either. It’s a beautiful clash of unhealthy emotions and a heartfelt vulnerability that needs to be felt rather than described. So, I'm gonna shut up here and you go listen to When No Birds Sang as soon as you can.
If you like what Ben does and want to hear him talk about books and movies too, follow his site Dead End Follies on Instagram.
If you like what Ben does and want to hear him talk about books and movies too, follow his site Dead End Follies on Instagram.
