Compared to the other branches of the heavy-metal family tree, grindcore bands face a disproportionately uphill battle when it comes to leaving an impact. As inheritors of both hardcore’s blistering short-form and death metal’s ear-splitting volume, they readily renounce sonic wiggle room, and by extension, conventional dynamics. In the right hands, grindcore’s shock-and-awe can feel dreamlike, even sublime. But fumble it, and the uniformity renders the whole storm moot, another passing flurry.
Maryland/Pennsylvania crushers Full of Hell are well aware of these limitations, and have strived—and for the most part, succeeded—to overcome them since their 2009 inception. On their first two releases, 2011’s Roots of Earth Are Consuming My Home and 2013’s Rudiments of Mutilation, the band subverted sameness by tracing their basement fury with industrial touches (crackling samples, glitchy effects), filling out the din with textural frisson. Since then, Full of Hell have spent the bulk of their time in crossover mode. They’ve penned joint LPs with the avant-garde elite (Merzbow, The Body) and released splits with rabid contemporaries like Nails and Psywarfare, assembling a diverse arsenal of noisemakers in the process.
Full of Hell’s upgraded toolbox is on full display on Trumpeting Ecstasy, their third and best solo album. With the coaching of hardcore luminary Kurt Ballou, the band barrel through a thrilling 23-minute gauntlet, all mosh-pits, sludge piles, and—because this is a Full of Hell album—bone-chilling reminders that we’re all going to die. While it’s anything but a crossover in the traditional sense (if you didn’t like grindcore before, this one probably won’t change your mind), the 11-song effort marks an impressive show of stylistic transcendence.
Trumpeting Ecstasy is Full of Hell’s first studio album without Brandon Brown, the band’s co-founding bassist and one half of its unparalleled tag-team behind the mic; his demonic, guttural register is the ying to frontman Dylan Walker’s piercing yang, a hellish interplay that’s easily one of grindcore’s national treasures. But Brown’s replacement, Sam DiGristine, maintains this tradition with aplomb on “Gnawed Flesh” and “Crawling Back to God,” bellowing from the gut as his bandmate screams his head off. On “Branches of Yew” and “Bound Sphynx,” guitarist and effects wizard Spencer Hazard accelerates the jagged see-saw with tremoring, dread-laden riffs, matched note-for-note by drummer Dave Bland. Ballou rounds out the interstitial space—however few seconds that are left, anyway—with sinister, crackled melodrama: “The trees are in misery,” sighs a sampled Werner Herzog before the first peals of “Deluminate,” the album’s opening peal of Nordic Thunder.
Although Full of Hell spend the majority of Trumpeting Ecstasy examining their usual tricks through an expanded prism, their overall approach remains the same. They take a sweeping panorama of the abyss, compress it down to a single point, and shade it in until it breaks. Towards the end of the album, the band momentarily loosen their grip, to great effect: art-pop auteur Nicole Dollanganger swoops into the static with an otherworldly aria, flooding the void with light. Less than a minute later—which can feel like an eternity in grindcore time—we’re back into oblivion. Following the sludgy closer “At the Cauldron’s Bottom,” the album chugs to a close, but that angelic interlude remains—an unsettling, unshakable magic. Such is the album’s spell.
