Full of Hell - Weeping Choir

Full of Hell have been one of the most ambitious, tenacious workhorses of grindcore this decade, and the seeds they had sewn for years sprouted fruitfully with their critical breakthrough two years ago on Trumpeting Ecstasy, an uncompromisingly heavy and experimental offering of deathgrind that drew many eyes towards them and lots of influence from them. And after rounding the year off with a decent second collaborative album with The Body, Full of Hell enjoyed a relatively creatively quiet 2018, only releasing about six minutes of new music, spending most of the year touring in deserved celebration of their acclaimed third full-length, and quietly constructing their fourth.

As its somewhat mirror-image-like cover suggests, Weeping Choir is intended to be seen as related to Trumpeting Ecstasy, but even without the cover art or the band saying so, drawing the sonic connection between the two would not be difficult at all, as Weeping Choir is very much a sequel in sound, style, and spirit to Trumpeting Ecstasy. Full of Hell again muster all their violent, abrasive death metal power and concentrate it into a dense, potent, and enrapturing 25 minutes. It’s such a comprehensively similar follow-up to Trumpeting Ecstasythat it’s hard to really point out something this album does separately across its whole length that its sister album didn’t already do (and that’s not a bad thing in this case; I’m not complaining about a second helping of sweet, delicious, disgusting, cruel deathgrind). If there’s one thing I can think of that gives this album a slightly different feel of more dynamic, volatile sorrow compared to Trumpeting Ecstasy’s relentless sadism, it’s perhaps how the variety of diverse, harsh musical elements are a bit more segregated on this album. The band provide a focused battering stream of industrial noise on the three minutes of the track “Rainbow Coil”, and the glitchy noise heavily laced throughout the song “Angels Gather Here” on the other side of the album serves to eccentrify its metallic march and distinguish it from the tracks around it. Meanwhile, other songs like “Thundering” preserve the band’s original hardcore elements and make for more strict deathgrind pieces to provide the bulk of the album’s muscle while creative guitar work spices up songs like the wildly noisy soloing on “Ygramul the Many” and the Portal-esque tremolo picking on “Haunted Arches” that gives the feeling of spiraling downward helplessly through a void of horrors.

But aside from the variety of instrumental and production techniques the band uses to enhance the abrasion of their grind, Dylan Walker’s similarly well-rounded and vibrant presence behind the microphone continues to be a shining feature of the band’s sound, with songs like “Burning Myrrh” and “Aria of Jeweled Tears” making their impact partly through the fittingly grating scrape of his blood-curdling high shrieks and “Downward” and “Silmaril” showcasing his similar proficiency and comfort with producing full-sounding low-register growls and grunts.

And speaking of vocal reinforcement, it’s a big part of what makes the seven-minute centerpiece of the album the undisputed highlight in the track listing. As its length suggests, “Armory of Obsidian Glass” is a powerful experience that patiently unfolds through a series of sections that build upon one another. The song opens with the kind of sustained guitar distortion drone that Sunn O))) is famous for, though it eventually bursts into a slow but smothering march of pounding drum accents and layers of tortured, throaty, demonic growls all supported by the most eerie and ghostly backing of choir vocals. It’s already an uniquely punishing song, but the band unexpectedly cut midway through to seemingly air an open wound through some of most truly, painfully sorrowful clean guitar backing and a guest feature from the talented Kristin Hayter (the famed mastermind of Lingua Ignota), whose somber wavering swoon gives the track its deservedly climactic and cathartic ending.

The only individual track I really have an issue with is the closing track for its lack of anything beyond the band’s established, comprehensive deathgrind and for how its brevity leaves the album feeling truncated at the end, which may have been intentional, but if so, I sort want to hope that the band pick up where they left off and finish what they started in the form of a grand trilogy.

Full of Hell certainly have their extra noisily abrasive and experimentally supplemented form of deathgrind down to a science now as Trumpeting Ecstasy and now Weeping Choir illustrate, and I’d say that for the most part that Weeping Choir is about on par with its predecessor, though I’d say Trumpeting Ecstasy still sits a notch higher in my book for now for how powerful some of that album’s filthiest, grindiest highlights are. It’s hard to say if there’s anything the band could possibly do to further bolster their sound from a sonic and aesthetic standpoint. Their ambition to continue pushing grindcore into noisier territories is showing no signs of dying out here, but with how well they’ve manged to forge their sound already, part of me thinks the band trying to experiment even more might end up with them getting too ahead of themselves. And, again, they’ve already mastered their current aesthetic. At this point, with the potent arsenal of destructive sounds they have at their disposal, I think the best thing for Full of Hell to do might be to work on optimizing their use of that sonic weaponry from a compositional standpoint. This is not to say that this is what Weeping Choir should have been, but now that a worthy and similar follow-up to Trumpeting Ecstasy has been fleshed out, it does show that this might be a good path for the band to go down for the immediate future. This hindsight does not, for me, lessen how strong of a record Weeping Choir is, and I feel I must again emphasize that following up an album like Trumpeting Ecstasy with a roughly equally thrilling sequel is a feat that Full of Hell should be receiving much more praise than dismay for. Weeping Choir is a resounding follow-up of similar style rather than a safe, stale repeat of ideas, it deserved to be enjoyed just as its predecessor was, and I am certainly going to do just that.

Weeping Ecstasy/10