Review Summary: "All matter is just the devil crawling back to God."
It's easy to see why Full of Hell have been able to flip their gruff image so startlingly over the past few years. From a scrappy grinders to full blown violent art-house heroes, the band has made some brilliant creative choices which has afforded them an unlikely following from differing corners of the music Internetosphere. Paring with outsider artists has enabled the band to flourish in unlikely places. Much of this adoration comes from their extraordinary flexibility--uncommon for a band, which, on paper would seem so boilerplate.
In spite of their many permutations there is really nothing like Full of Hell laid bare which is exactly what they offer with
Trumpeting Ecstasy. Strip away the noise of Merzbow or the murky aesthetics of The Body and you're left with a unrelenting force that encompasses just about every form of
heavy music that exists. Mixing metal and its numerous breeds (sludge, death, black...and so on and so forth), all at once, with grind and hardcore sounds like it should be a mess (spoiler: it is.) But that's always been the beauty of Full of Hell, and admittedly the oft utilized aesthetic they prescribe to.
Trumpeting Ecstasy a bit of an anomaly, comparatively, as it feels almost...accessible? It still shares the emblematic adornments one would expect from the band: short songs, uncompromising energy, inventive use of noise, and so on and so forth. The death metal influences that have always seemed like the other side of the band's coin is brought even more into the spotlight, with tracks like "Crawling Back to God" acting as straight early to mid aughts death. When it seems like the band sticks to this path, blistering reminders in the form of "The Cosmic Vein" and "Fractured Quartz" emphasize that Full of Hell are still punks at heart.
Yet there is a method to all the madness, a sort of natural structure underlining the record. "Digital Prison" and "Crawling Back to God" are strikingly different songs, but flow into one another and compliment each other so well that it would be hard to imagine them being a part. Bouts of fury and pummeling hysteria are met with odd calm, like in the album's title track, which may seem jarring at first but are elucidating in context. All of this comes together in the confines of a short but explosive collection; a tighter and more dense creation than Full of Hell have ever done.
Trumpeting Ecstasy may not surpass the brilliance of the collaborative works with Merzbow, or even The Body, but Full of Hell's prolificity has not dulled the brilliance that has always been there.
