A weep so beautiful
When you think of the term “avant-garde,” images of incredibly artsy interpretive routines and further examples of the like usually to come to mind. Yet, the term “avant-garde grindcore” is something much less familiar and quite possibly a bit more off-putting. There are many moving parts and mechanisms that would go into producing a sound so aggressively creative, yet Full of Hell know all about it. Their last album Trumpeting Ecstasy and its recent companion album Weeping Choir are direct examples of how this works, even if it seems implausible. Weeping Choir, in its own way, actually does work as a choir of noisily abrasive sounds that work towards Full of Hell maintaining their established sound. If anything, they’ve zeroed in on it even more.
It starts with “Burning Myrrh,” which provides a sampler of FOH’s most perfected elements rolled into one—destructive vocal output, battering drums, and chugging riffs you can’t escape. All of these things are definitely present throughout the album, but FOH intently made sure to warn listeners of what’s to come.
Not in a negative way, though. Tracks like “Rainbow Coil” and “Armory of Obsidian Glass” showcase some of what they’ve picked up along the way, like the full-on assaultive pairing of pounding drums and roughly projected vocals on the former, which could be attributed to their work with The Body, or the hauntedly sludginess of the latter, which features vocals from Lingua Ignota. “Ygramul the Many” is also a fairly telling track. Not necessarily because of anything “new” that it does, but because it showcases exactly what FOH is most known for—playing every instrument at an incredibly fast pace, backed my disorienting vocality that is both dizzying and gratifying at the same time.
It’s nice to see Full of Hell working fully within and among themselves again. Their collabs and splits are high points for them, but what they create on their own is definitely something to be noticed. With Weeping Choir, we see Full of Hell honing in on the ecstatic grindcore they’ve spent years developing, and it seems like it’ll only get better as time goes on.
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