Full of Hell and Nothing Explore the Space Between Brutal and Beautiful on When No Birds Sang

When it’s time to engrave something on a tombstone for the Maryland noise-metal band Full of Hell, here’s an idea for the monumental mason: PLAYED NICE WITH OTHERS. That’s a good legacy for a band to leave behind, and a rare one, too. How many have not one, not two, not even three but five full-length albums collaboratively written with other bands in their catalog? Not many! And certainly not many with as distinctive a style as Full of Hell, whose music is so relentlessly dense, dark and pulverizing it’ll make you feel like your brain is being dismantled, your ears are suffocating and the walls are closing in.

Still, the band has a proven track record of figuring out how to integrate its uncommon roar into others’ sound. You can hear that in the glitchy shriek-scapes of Full of Hell’s two albums with experimental duo The Body, in the staticky unpredictability of their 2014 collaboration with Japanese noise legend Merzbow and on this year’s Suffocating Hallucination, an album created with Denver doom titans Primitive Man that sounds like two rusty warships colliding in super slo-mo. In each case, Full of Hell sounds like Full of Hell, but Bodied, Merzbow-ed and Primitive Man’d, respectively. It’s an impressive streak of shape-shifting, really.

So it comes as no great surprise that the band’s new collaboration with veteran Philly shoegazers Nothing successfully finds the sonic midpoint between the two. And while Nothing is, indeed, a shoegaze band, it’s a shoegaze band with deep roots in punk (frontman Domenic Palermo was in the hardcore band Horror Show) and a natural tendency toward the darker, noisier, louder end of the genre. “We’ve been called any style you can think of,” Palermo says about both his band and Full of Hell, “but we’re both simply intent on making soul crushers.”

The two waste no time fulfilling that intent, kicking off the album with “Rose Tinted World,” an eight-minute onslaught of sludgy guitar riffs, searing distortion and Full of Hell frontman Dylan Walker singing about fallow fields and unsown love in a strangled wail. From there, the bands drift from ugly to pretty and back again, at times seeming to linger in the spaces in between. “Like Stars in the Firmament” is this collaboration at its fluffiest, fusing a hypnotic guitar melody with clean, dreamy vocals that belie the existential fear being expressed in the lyrics:

The flames of hell have reached the heavens
They’re singing through the floors
I don’t wanna die

Later, the shortest song on the record, “Forever Well,” builds from a slow, pulsing intro into an unmistakably Deafheaven-like blend of soaring guitars and guttural howls about fever dreams and screaming lungs, while the album’s closer, “Spend the Grace,” reveals that the bands figured out how to be ominous and weird without necessarily razing everything in sight. And the title track simmers for nearly six minutes, juxtaposing dead-eyed, almost chanted vocals with swirling post-rock set to crescendo at a snail’s pace.

All three of these songs find Full of Hell and Nothing at their most integrated, where the lines between them disappear and a new form starts to take shape. They also provide a glimpse of what’s possible when two bands truly push beyond collaboration into an entirely unexplored new space. For these two, that’s a place of uncommon beauty and brutality, living together as one.

Ben Salmon is a committed night owl with an undying devotion to discovering new music. He lives in Oregon, where he hosts a killer radio show and obsesses about Kentucky basketball from afar. Follow him on your social media platform of choice at @bcsalmon.