Full of Hell have never been afraid to push beyond the boundaries of their grindcore and powerviolence roots. They’ve always collaborated with artists from Japanese noise demon Merzbow to shoegazers Nothing, and have released numerous splits along the way with the likes of fellow grindmongers Nails. Beyond that, they’ve ridden through the clouds of doom with Primitive Man and banged with the pneumatic hammers of The Body. Their new collaborative release with Andrew Nolan, back-to-back with their latest album as a duo, stands as a fresh landmark in their catalogue, showcasing their ever-evolving intensity.. In Scraping The Divine, Nolan brings his distinct illbient industrial dub style, which blends seamlessly with the bands’ previous achievements with The Body and even their cranky side-poject Collapsed Skull to produce a virulent fusion of grindcore and hip hop.
‘Gradual Timeslip’ is tormented by the sore shrieks of Endon’s Taichi Nagura, which counterbalance Dylan Walker’s more varied screams. Meditating on pain has always been a part of Full of Hell’s vocation, in contrast to more traditional grindcore bands that focus on gut-splitting splatterpunk imagery. Here, the music seems tied to a sense of cosmic pessimism, as ‘Burdened by Solar Mass’ and ‘Sphere of Saturn’ are engulfed by the agonising gravity of these celestial bodies. The latter is undoubtedly a Justin Broadrick number, with his guest vocals reminiscent of the subdued murmurings in Jesu, paired with Godflesh-style guitar licks. And who can imagine an industrial metal-dub production without his signature influence? I think his sway can be felt throughout the album.
Industrial pulses catch up with the band’s grinding machine in many ways. Stormy noises on ‘Approaching the Monolith’ rage like solar flares shattering sonic detectors. Glitches puncture through amorphous screams in ‘Extinguished Glow’. The tracks shift fluidly between grindcore tendencies and dub elements, creating a dynamic back-and-forth throughout the album that lends an unpredictable edge to the songs. In ‘Heat Death From the Pyre’, static pierces through blast beats, while ‘Paralytic Lineage’ lets throbbing cranks take the lead in its songwriting.
There’s a Werner Herzog quote epitaphing the opening track of 2017’s Trumpeting Ecstasy. The German director reflects on the misery of nature, “the same misery that is all around us”. Scraping The Divine encapsulates this existential dread from outer space through its own radio telescope. Though it falls within the same realm as The Body collaborations, in this record the group dig deeper into the dub-grindcore synthesis and float more freely in the possibilities of their audacious sound.
