Disciples of The Skulldozer: Full Of Hell

Full Of Hell - Roots of The Earth Are Consuming My Home
2011, A389

In true power violence-style Full Of Hell's debut full length, Roots of The Earth Are Consuming My Home, kicks off with a short feedback-laden noise burst before it erupts into full fledged metallic hadcore insanity. Openers Pile Of Dead Horses and Endless Drone are in many ways indicative of the bands musical formula throughout the entire album, where maniacal speed is mixed with devastatingly heavy sludge sections. Not that mixing d-beat harcore with metallic riffs and heavy breakdowns, interspersed by ferocious grinding blast beats any way is a unique concept these days, but having honed their skills over their previous releases FOH seems to have learned that brevity, as well as the fact that one great riff is better than ten weak ones, is key to writing great songs in this style. In essence what is boils down to is this: if you can write an amazing song like Rat King, that sates your hunger for heavy as fuck, feedback-screeching, sludge as well as raging hardcore and you manage to do it in under three minutes, then, let's just say you know what the hell you're doing. Which is really astonishing when you consider the fact that some of these guys are barely out of their teens yet. What sets apart this album even further from the rest of FOH's peers is the inclusion of the awesome Bastard Noise-esque noise/power electronics interlude White Mare, that break up the pace of the album in a very effective way. I also dig the way they throw in the almost interlude-ish track The Oars Are Broken where everything is taken down a notch: where the bass does a slow ominous shuffle underneath sprinkled swirls of feedback before exploding into the closing track. This reminds me of something Dead Kennedys did on Moral Majority and a few other tracks. Simply brilliant. The recording here is heavy and crisp without sounding brittle or muddy, which is often the case with this style that centers equally on heaviness and speed, while the song writing is close to fucking perfection. I can hear loads of influences at work here, from d-beat hardcore and breakdown-heavy NYHC to Infest-like power violence, sludge and grind, but they're all interwoven in a way that makes it into something much more unfied and much stronger, mainly due to the stellar song writing. This is one of the very best albums to be released 2011, no doubt in my mind. Buy.