Full Of Hell should come with a safety warning. Not a parental advisory sticker, but something to say that when you listen to ‘Trumpeting Ecstasy’ your life is in danger, because it is utterly ferocious. From the opening seconds of ‘Deluminate’, the only feeling it can be likened to is being burnt alive by the caustic instrumentation and brute force it hits you with. Even a fan of the most abrasive type of music would grind their teeth at this.
After the collaborative efforts of their last few releases, with the likes of The Body and Merzbow, ‘Trumpeting Ecstasy’ is their first album proper since 2013’s ‘Rudiments Of Mutilation’. If you thought Full Of Hell couldn’t get any harsher, it turns out they can. The eleven tracks they have provided only just top the twenty-minute mark, and as expected, it sounds like the end of the world.
Expanding on their death metal influence, Dylan Walker’s guttural vocals combined with visceral bursts of noise go straight for the jugular. The searing grindcore riffs that leave just as quickly as they arrive through ‘Bound Sphinx’ and ‘Crawling Back To God’ are delivered with chest-collapsing ferocity. And then there are the blast beats that seem non-stop, save for a few cavernous breaks of sludge in ‘Gnawed Flesh’ and the hypnotic conclusion of ‘At The Cauldron’s Bottom’.
It’s hard to believe that human beings have created ‘Trumpeting Ecstasy’; it’s as close to the actual sound of what your parents thought was “The Devil’s Music” when you first started listening to heavy metal. Each track never outstays its welcome and they are joined together to form one long burst of aggression, leaving you lifeless and devoid of hope.
No one can honestly say that ‘Trumpeting Ecstasy’ is a pleasant listen, and that’s probably just the way Full Of Hell like it. Their music is designed to be uncompromising and downright terrifying. Now that the trumpets have sounded, the end is no longer nigh; it’s here, and in the form of one of most brutal records that will be released this year.
GLEN BUSHELL