How far can you go with grindcore, that hyper-fast genre distilling the most cacophonous elements of punk? That’s the question, or rather the challenge, posed by American quintet Full of Hell. Coagulated Bliss takes the young band into slightly more oblique and anguished waters than usual, without necessarily offering anything new.
Always prioritizing short bursts of energy, the band manages to let us hear sparks of experimentation in their new album, the umpteenth addition to an already dense discography. The album traverses an aesthetic field covering math rock, noise, industrial, electronic experimentation and muddy doom with saxophone. More evocations than real escapades, Full of Hell moves swiftly from one influence to another, demonstrating its knowledge of the spectrum of extreme underground music. In this sense, the band pushes its grindcore to the margins without deviating from it. It has to be said that, with an average of one and a half minutes per track, there’s little room to develop new ideas at length. Full of Hell save this kind of experimentation for their many collaborations with other artists.
After all, it’s this ferocity, as destructive as it is fleeting, that draws people to Full of Hell. And the band’s popularity fully justifies the frequency with which they produce albums barely 20 minutes long. If you look too hard for subtlety on Coagulated Bliss, you run the risk of completely missing the blazing outlet it offers.
