Full of Hell topped my ‘favourite bands’ list in 2022. The band did so based on sheer listening time. But neither my muso nor non-muso friends engage with it. So, why do I like it?
It’s something of a mystery. Full of Hell’s music is exceptionally abrasive and has at least three major things going against it:
After seeing them lay waste to Electric Brixton in London a month ago, I couldn’t tell you which song they played. They have no ‘hits’ or any singalong passages. Their records are dense, murky affairs, punctuated by infernal screaming and the noise of a million shards colliding. Even the clean stuff is ghostly.
You can’t bob your head to the beat if that’s the thing you usually latch on to. It’s too chaotic.
Finally, there’s a total dearth of cuteness in the guitar and bass licks. There’s no apparent riff worship. You could even say it’s anti-guitar music.
On the face of it, it sounds horrible. But I still can’t stop listening. There are some guesses as to why – all too intellectual to explain the visceral pull:
One is that they sound fresh. ‘Groundbreaking’ is how Jacob Bannon described it when his band Converge followed Full of Hell’s set that night in Brixton. Although this might be right, it rather sounds like a critic’s assessment.
The other is that the band reaches a level of sonic and emotional extremity that tops any other thing I’d heard up to then. But such an effect would have worn off by now.
The only guess that stands so far is their inscrutability. They use a familiar metal vocabulary but distort it far beyond cliché or recognisability. That’s maybe why I’m still playing catch-up.
If you love ’em, drop us a comment to say what drew you to them.
Text by label boss Spyridon, who sings and plays guitar in Decades in the Shadows. Photo by Kevin Scullion, used with the band’s permission.
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