Review Summary: Fangs deep through your bleeding neck.
Weeping Choir is a venomous bite. It's a sound that will nibble away the little mental health you have left if you have been dosing yourself with it for as long as the band has been pumping it. Ten years of storms and several abrasive plots with noise apostles like Merzbow and The Body have brought Full of Hell to record one of the best albums they have ever written.
Their latest release embodies everything they have said and done up to this point in their career, cranked and refined. The grindcore is faster, the sludge is back, thicker and wiser, and the walls of noise are as impenetrable as they can possibly be. Combine these three cores and what you have is Full of Hell's best possible incarnation. Here are some reasons why:
From the very first second, a blast beat fires up at full speed pulled by dissonant, razor cutting guitars. Dylan Walker's deranged shrieks and beastly growls (probably bass master Sam’s) battle their way through opener "Burning Myrrrh" like a mouth foaming creature chasing its own shadow until it has devoured it. That's just the first contact. No build up nonsense, no intro, no warnings or time to prepare; venom's in, so sit back and suck it all!
"Haunted Arches" starts right away and ends in a hot minute, first half trying to burst your veins, and the other half successfully breaching through with a spiraling, vertigo inducing guitar riff that leads into "Thundering Hammers". Time for old school death metal and pummeling beats that show Full of Hell has no intention to let go. While
Weeping Choir is mainly fueled by shot bursts of grindcore and blackened death metal like these in the vein of Cephalic Carnage, or the most hilarious manifestations of Agoraphobic Nosebleed, there are a few moments of clarity that give
Weeping Choir that very special and unique taste.
Echoes of previous bromances with The Body come in the form of tracks like "Rainbow Coil", which is an insane three-minute slab of noise and industrial shenanigans, and the saturated torment of "Angels Gather Here". God knows these two bands were meant for each other. Meanwhile, "Armory of Obsidian Glass" is an easy standout, featuring seven rare minutes of phantasmagorical sludge and a black metal finale that constitute one of the best tracks the band has ever produced.
Weeping Choir easily stands as one, if not the most, prominent metal release of 2019. It's a road to extreme metal paradise for fans of the genre courtesy of a band at the top of their game, and by how things are looking for them, with promising collaborations in the near future with artists like Lingua Ignota, Full of Hell is the name of a scar that will hardly disappear anytime soon.
