Review: Full Of Hell & Andrew Nolan ‘Scraping The Divine’
Since 2009, Maryland/Pennsylvania based Full Of Hell have been creating some of the most beautifully nightmarish music you’ll hear, both on their own and in collaboration with acts as various as noise pioneer Merzbow, the doomy Primitive Man, sludge metal brutalists The Body, and shoegaze Nothing. Scraping The Divine is the latest of their collaborations, made with industrial artist Andrew Nolan.
Nolan himself has a long and darkly lustrous history dating back to the 1990s in Scotland, now relocated to Canada. It was through one of his former projects, The Endless Blockade, that Nolan and Full Of Hell first came into contact. Dylan Walker (vocals/electronics/noise) wrote to Nolan in Full Of Hell’s early days to learn about The Endless Blockade’s live electronics, and Nolan and Full Of Hell have collaborated in other ways since then.
Remixes, guest appearances, and live shows have all provided points of contact between these artists. Scraping The Divine is, then, the culmination of their shared history – with additional contributions from Taichi Nagura (Endon), GxCx (Contagious Orgasm, BBVGC, ex-Guilty Connector), Justin K. Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu, JK Flesh), Intensive Care, and Alex Hughes (Hatred Surge, Holy Money).
This is an impressive roster of guest artists on an already impressive collaboration. But what does this all sound like? The cover art, by Savage Pencil, provides a hint: a seemingly chaotic swirl of red and black, twisting across a yellow background, shot through with blank and blackened eyes.
The first tack, Gradual Timeslip, sets the stage for what’s to come with an insistent beat before distorted guitar, pulsing electronics, and a screaming wail of a voice join in. At one point, everything gives way for a brief moment to a vast, insistent beat before grinding ahead. The song lasts just less than four minutes, but its more than enough time to pummel and enrapture with its fierceness.
Heat Death From The Pyre follows, a shuddering start before that piercing wail, fierce and anguished, moves through the static – an electronic static that reasserts itself later. Driving percussion propels the song forward through its harsh landscape, before Burdened By Solar Mass cuts through. There’s a strange calm to the opening riff, rising and falling, which moves through the track, morphing into a swirl of tormented electronics and crackling distortion shrouded with insistent dub pulses. This track was the first single from the album, and it’s easy to see why. There’s something hypnotic about it that draws you in – that pulsing dub, the screaming distortion – and pulls you down into some unknowable depth, before it ejects you, leaving you hoping that more will soon follow.
And it does, in the form of Sphere Of Saturn, the second single, which features Justin K. Broadrick. And it is immediately recognizable as something he had a hand in. The haziness and discordant guitar gives it away, as does the song’s pace. It is that moment of calm the previous track implied but quickly vanquished. Here though, the sound comes in low waves, woven through with Walker’s harsh vocals to offset Broadrick’s haze. Its discordant beauty fades out into a repetitive mechanical sound, and then the high-pitched electrical whine of Hemlock Gnosis takes over.
A beautiful yet harrowing listen…
Like the prior track, this one rumbles and sprawls for most of its length, hard drum hits pierce the electronic haze. We end on what sounds like a recording made aboard one of Toronto’s subway cars as it snakes its way through the city. We can expect a delay due to ‘an injury at track level’. As someone who lived in Toronto for years, I heard this announcement more than once and know it sometimes meant a person had been hit by one of the trains. A morbid bit of field recording, but apt, considering hemlock was used often in ancient Greece to execute prisoners. The philosopher Socrates was condemned for introducing strange gods and corrupting the youth of Athens, being the most well-known.
A metallic crashing – cymbal or sheet metal? – opens the next track, Blessed Anathema. A heavy riff hums and buzzes like an angry swarm, opening up at moments to give space for a spiraling industrial swirl, finally jittering into Facing The Divide. Here, a sound like metal moving through water greets you as Walker’s commanding voice rises above, underscored by a grinding, screeching wave of electronic noise, accompanied by thunderous beats drawn from some apocalyptic ritual. Then, a cacophony of raging distortion, mangled and broken electronics, and truly the apocalypse is upon us.
At only one and a half minutes, Approaching The Monolith is the shortest track, yet, it has packed into it everything that marks this album as a true collaboration between Full Of Hell and Nolan. In Extinguished Glow we find the aftermath of the world ending inferno we just passed through. Tortured synths and glitched rhythmic noise meld with the reverberations of some other world, perhaps emerging from the ashes. Or the sounds of a ferocious beast stalking this wasted land.
The twisted electric lightning moves into Common Miracles, which is quickly filled with massive, distorted riffs, Walker’s voice echoing over the top like some shaman drawing forth nightmares for his community. As the track grinds on, it’s easier and easier to see this image of a post-apocalyptic ritual play out. When Irradiated Sands breaks in, it’s like an ushering further into the end times: a grating, glitching electronics permeates the latter portion of the song rising from the first portion’s tornado of distortion. And suddenly, we really are at the end as the heaviness of Paralytic Lineage begins to unfold. A doomy menace compliments the industrial beat and pulse, the guttural voice layered with itself to create a weirdly unsettling effect.
When the grinding guitar fades out on this last song, the snap of electricity giving way to silence, my first impulse is to listen again. This is a stunning album, near perfect in sound, a testament to the skill of the producers and engineers these artists worked with. Nolan handled tracking, mixing, and production, while Full Of Hell recorded with producer Seth Manchester of Machines With Magnets and Kevin Bernsten of Developing Nations with mastering carried out by Nick Townsend.
The result is the cacophonous, ominous beauty you hear, a sound able to conjure up visions of both the end and the world to come, evoking a deep, almost ritual menace. Throughout, themes of time, destruction, and decay play out, yet, this is not just a description of an apocalypse. It is a rising from the ashes, and it is the fire that burns the world and calls forth another.
The album is a true collaboration, weaving the talents of each of its individual contributors seamlessly into a whole. There are no moments that happen outside of the main vision, it is so coherent that it is entirely in its own world. A beautiful yet harrowing listen with a sound all of its own, something to drown yourself in and emerge renewed on the other side. This may be part of the point: in a statement about the single Sphere Of Saturn, Nolan said that the song’s message is about ‘the futility of pessimism.’ We can be crushed, almost obliterated, but there is also a way through, Scraping The Divine shows us the path.
Label: Closed Casket Activities
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Andrew Nolan: Bandcamp | Instagram
Scribed by: Amanda Votta
