Full of Hell
Coagulated Bliss
CLOSED CASKET ACTIVITIES
The captivating paradox of grindcore is that the genre’s short song lengths yield the most fertile playgrounds, the potential to do truly anything so long as the sense of brutal efficiency remains intact. Free from traditional structure, anything’s possible—including the genres, influences, and forms it can pull from. Full of Hell have become renowned for illustrating this over the years with expeditious clarity. Take their 2023 output, for instance, where they released three collaborative albums, welding their gnashing death metal vocals to genres like doom metal, drone, and shoegaze. Paradoxically for a grindcore band, only one song across all three of those records lasted less than four minutes. And yet Full of Hell never sounded like they were out of their comfort zone—instead, it came across more like they were merely exploring unchecked territory.
It’s only natural that the first non-collaborative record from the band in three years sees them taking that freewheeling curiosity back into their own universe. Coagulated Bliss is a record of fascinating dualities: it’s Full of Hell at their most expansive, yet it’s also perhaps their most focused album to date. Its stylings rest all over the map, yet each sideswipe is treated as a new opportunity to take the listener by surprise all over again. Opener “Half Life of Changelings” bursts into the fray with one of the sunniest riffs in Full of Hell’s library before dropping the ground out from under you in a barrage of guitar chugs and blast beats, as if seizing the opportunity for a right hook in the misdirect. Just when you catch your breath, “Doors to Mental Agony” has even more tricks up its sleeve—a disarmingly steady stomp riff, a sudden tempo change into a thrash breakdown, and a climactic hurricane of death metal vocals that swallow the track whole. And we’re still only under three minutes in.
Coagulated Bliss comes to be defined by this kind of variety, this expectation that Full of Hell can take on any heavy mode at a moment’s notice. The language of grindcore isn’t static here: the band are just as likely to switch things up for a lumbering doom cut (“Bleeding Horizon”), broken percussive samples that border on electronic (“Fractured Bonds to Mecca”), or a coda of cataclysm-heralding saxophone (closer “Malformed Ligature”) as they are to deploy any traditional forms of riffs or growls. For Full of Hell, havoc exists wherever you can find it, in whatever fashion you can conjure it.
That’s not to say that Coagulated Bliss is beyond the visceral thrill of a fastball right over the plate, which the straightforward deathgrind ripper of a title track delivers in spades. On the contrary, most of the exhilaration and density of the record is found in just how propulsive each of the shifts are, complicating the sense of what the record—and Full of Hell—can be. Such is the case on “Gasping Dust,” which heaves and pauses as if syncopating the sounds of hacking up a lung. Dylan Walker’s lyrics here are at their most pointed and unflinchingly bleak with their snapshots of ecocide, closing with a line about “mourning the Earth that was.”
Yet as a pure piece of music, the track carries all the things that make a great grindcore recording land: emphatic death metal screams, an ambitious structural gambit, and an indelibly fucked-up riff that’s equally nasty and unshakeable, even when it barely has a minute to live. Full of Hell aren’t happy with just being comfortable in the sound they’ve carved out; they keep digging further, and their work keeps finding new brutal horizons.
