Maryland’s Full of Hell are not fucking about. 6 studio albums, 5 collaboration albums, 9 EPs, 8 splits, and 4 live albums in 15 years, and with their latest album Coagulated Bliss (Closed Casket Activities), the band continues to demonstrate their refusal to stand still.
How would you describe Full Of Hell to someone who’d never heard the band before? (And no listing genres, that’s cheating). How would you encompass the whole oeuvre? Abrasive? Definitely. Eclectic? For sure. As rabid and demented sounding as a bulldog trapped in a greenhouse on a hot summer’s day with a swarm of angry bees? Yes!
To those familiar with the band, Coagulated Bliss contains everything you know and love about Full of Hell. One-minute explosions of grindcore fury? See: “Gasping Dust.” Intestine-rupturing, death-metal assaults? See: “Vomiting Glass.” Jazzy, avant-garde, descents into the void of extreme-metal insanity? The closer “Malformed Ligature” has you covered.
And all of that is great. Really great. But you know what else Coagulated Bliss has? Noise Rock, baby!! In particular, guitarist and chief-songwriter Spencer Hazard taps into his love of AmRep-era Today Is The Day (hallelujah!), most prominently heard on the album’s artery-severing title track, featuring one of the band’s most memorable guitar hooks and killer drum work.
But, wait! There’s more! Amid so many one-two-minute liver kicks, sits the six-minute behemoth “Bleeding Horizon.” Starting out with a droning, doom march, vocalist Dylan Walker’s screaming wails come like a bad dream out of the night. And just when they’ve got you all nice and (un)comfortable, the glorious final minute and a half kicks you about the face with an awesome head-banging stomp.
And we haven’t even talked about the slow, industrialised, churning insanity of “Fractured Bonds to Mecca.”
Let’s not beat around the bush, or give any mixed message here. Full of Hell is one of the most powerful, vital, and fearless bands operating in extreme metal (or metal in general) right now. Bow down at the altar of greatness.
Buy the album here:
https://fullofhell.bandcamp.com/album/coagulated-bliss
10 / 10
TOM OSMAN