Playing well with others
DISTINGUISHING YOURSELF FROM HORDES OF BANDS CAN BE DIFFICULT, but for Maryland/Pennsylvania experimental grindcore act Full of Hell, it’s natural. The band intertwine a mix of many different styles — including grindcore, punk, noise, death metal and more — in a unique way on their latest record, Weeping Choir.
The record could have been very different, if it hadn’t been for the direction they took on their last record, Trumpeting Ecstasy. They’ve stepped away from the noise elements brought in through collaborative albums with Merzbow and the Body, which vocalist Dylan Walker says set the bar for their sound going forward, and informed their approach for the new record.
“I think it was just a case of us doing what we were interested in bringing at the time. It was very ‘time and place,’ with Trumpeting Ecstasy
having less on the electronic side, because we had just done those collabs with the Body,” Walker explains. “With Weeping Choir, we
wanted to make a well-rounded record again, but to just be conscious that we knew we had stepped back last time.”
Keen fans will notice that Weeping Choir’s album art is the inverted image of the Trumpeting Ecstasy cover, and that’s no coincidence. Walker says the new record is a companion to their last, and although he prefers to keep lyrics open to interpretation, the themes on the two are connected.
“All I can say is that Trumpeting was like a bubble being popped in my personal life, a very ‘moment in time’ record, just based on what was going on in the Western world. Weeping Choir is all that’s left in the wake of that,” says Walker.
An integral piece of Full of Hell’s complex sound is the collaborative spirit they’ve developed over the past few years. Walker credits their wide-reaching sound to their noise projects, and while Weeping Choir isn’t a collaboration album, it features numerous guest spots, from members of Insect Warfare, Charles Bronson, Lingua Ignota and more.
“We were a little worried that the record was overloaded with guest spots, but that’s the whole spirit of collaborating to begin with, so it was so natural to just go with the flow. It’s a lot of guest spots, but it’s all friends and people that we really respect and enjoy as artists. It just felt like it made the record more of a collective force.”
Collaboration isn’t as common in metal as in other genres, but Full of Hell are leading a change. From Walker’s point of view, mainstream bands haven’t quite caught onto the idea, but more frequently, he’s seeing underground artists taking this approach.
“There’s just a cultural difference in the music communities. In hip-hop, it’s so integral to the foundation of all of it. It’s all collective, it’s all collaborative all the time. Even the approach to releasing music in hip-hop is completely different.”
“We worried it was overloaded with guests, but that’s the spirit of collaborating”