There are two Full Hells. There's Full of Hell who are known for making tight and carefully crafted grindcore on their self-titled albums. And then there's Full of Hell known for their ability to change their signature sound to the specifications of another band's music. On their previous collaborative albums, you can hear them scraping and tightening the aluminum waves of Merzbow, the freeform sludge of Body and the doom metal of Primitive Man. The beauty of Nothing's dirtbag shoe—its haziness, its defeatist riffing, the way songs move with Audrey Horne's oblivious swing—isn't an obvious stylistic match. But on their collaborative album, When no bird sang, Nothing's strolling pace forces Full of Hell to choose its steps carefully, while Full of Hell's ferocity and ear for detail erode some of Nothing's natural beauty. Like all great collaborations, it comes across as the work of just one band, and it's impossible to imagine either group making this record alone.
If Full of Hell and Nothing sound like they're facing each other When no bird sang, it could be because they were actually looking at each other. The full ensemble—Full of Hell's Dylan Walker, Spencer Hazard, Dave Bland and Sam DiGristine and Nothing's Domenic Palermo and Doyle Martin—set up shop in Ocean City, Maryland, and wrote together in person, rather than sending demos back and forth. The method gives the album a sense of focus even as it ventures into new territory for both acts, and their shared commitment to vulnerability softens even the hardest hits.
When no bird sang highlights the depression that always lurks within the heaviness of both bands. Opener “Rose Tinted World” is built around a thousand-foot-tall Black Sabbath riff from which Walker launches his scream. He's consistently one of extreme music's most inventive and exciting singers, and when words fail him in the middle, he switches to a frothy growl. It's a brutal opening, with feedback pounding around its edges and a beat that could turn granite to dust. But when the cheery samples of daytime television begin to filter in, spilling over each other in their eagerness to cling to the day's radiant happiness — “Miles and miles of sunshine,” gushes an anchor — their starker attitude recasts its malevolence. song. Instead of a show of strength, the vast darkness feels dwarfed by the relentlessly blank face of false optimism.
