Full of Hell released their fifth LP, Trumpeting Ecstasy, and I reviewed it.
For all the havoc Full of Hell has wreaked, the first thing you hear on Trumpeting Ecstasy, the group’s new full-length, is not the band. Instead, it opens with German director Werner Herzog speaking. “Nature here is vile and base,” he declares. “Of course, there is a lot of misery, but it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery.” As you might imagine, his thick accent (as well as the audio’s manipulation) gives those words a certain malevolence, setting the tone for the audio terrorism to come.
Ecstasy is FoH’s fifth LP overall, but it’s the first non-collaborative album since 2013’s Rudiments of Mutilation. Coming off of a particularly aggressive (and surprisingly catchy) split seven-inch with Nails from this past December, the effort sees FoH fully embrace the death metal aspects of their sound that have slowly creeped to the forefront and use them as the basis for much of the record’s songwriting.
This includes Dylan Walker’s vocals. While he was mostly a vein-bursting screamer in FoH’s early work, he’s added a death growl into the mix over time, giving him two distinct vocal styles to utilize. In some instances, the former controls the song; in other cases, the latter. Sometimes there’s a back-and-forth between them (as on “Gnawed Flesh”), allowing Walker to perform as if two personalities are fighting for control of his mind.
While a sizable chunk of Ecstasy is death metal-tinged, FoH is still a grindcore band. Interestingly, “Bound Sphinx” and the six-minute closer “At the Cauldron’s Bottom” seem to act as a bridge between the two worlds. Both begin as flailing nightmares before suddenly pivoting into droning, hardcore-esque marches. Perhaps as a way to reiterate the band’s roots, there appear to be nods to other grind stalwarts. “Crawling Back to God” has a zig-zagging riff that would make Pig Destroyer proud, while the sub-minute spastic tantrums “Branches of Yew,” “Digital Prison” and “Fractured Quartz” recall early Napalm Death.
Speaking of Napalm Death, Walker’s lyrics are similarly (far) left. Walker is one of extreme music’s sharpest lyricists, and has tackled left-leaning subjects before (proletariat suffering, societal apathy, etc.). Thus, it was only a matter of time before “man vs. nature” was discussed – hence the album’s opening. Nature as a literal topic, however, is only part of the story. Walker addresses man’s egotistical towering over nature (“Society is a blister on the skin of the planet/ Man is a pustule on the face of the Earth” and “The planet sings sweetly of empty chambers/ Of a future without the threat of species”). But he also reflects on man’s egotism in other aspects as well. “The Cosmic Vein” and “Gnawed Flesh” both castigate man’s assuredness of itself (with “Man will fail/ Man will always fail” being a blunt thesis), while “Crawling Back to God” and “Branches of Yew” see Walker return to a classic punching bag: religion.
Despite being only 23 minutes, Trumpeting Ecstasy offers much to unpack both lyrically and musically, and is a beautifully paced soundtrack to the apocalypse. And while Full of Hell’s whirling dervish outbursts aren’t anything new or unexpected in grind (except for the title track, which resembles last year’s joint work with The Body, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache), Ecstasy is nonetheless a worthy addition to the genre.