Recommended Album: Full of Hell & Nothing – ‘When No Birds Sang’

A band of Nothing has become one of the most defining sounds heading up the next wave of shoegaze music from the 2010s and beyond. We’re at the point where there are more than enough newer artists out there attempting to play catchup in creating music that is equally lush as it is devastatingly heavy a full decade after the release of their seminal debut, Guilty of Everything, and their influence carries so much gravitas that they can put on a bicoastal musical festival bolstering some of those names. Meanwhile, Full of Hell have become known as their own bastardized force of grindcore and experimental noise in realms smattered in ugly, harsh textures. Heaven and Hell are at an antithesis between these two artists, and yet not even purgatory makes for a suitable meeting ground on their collaborative effort, When No Birds Sang. The album, featuring six songs born out of fierce collaboration, showcases the Philly and Ocean City-based bands’ insatiable desire to explore even further outside the depths of the void which they’ve already ventured in something akin to a 9/11 allegory where our beautiful, common human existence coexists with the immense weight of tragedy and the notion that our mortality is absolutely finite with a big, dark unknown following behind it. Nothing frontman Domenic Palermo and Full of Hell vocalist Dylan Walker’s respective lyrics are the fine tip pens etching in the album’s details, and on its sonic canvas, a truly modernized vision of what slowcore can be in 2023 on “Like Stars In The Firmament”, the ambitious, ambient shoegaze of its title track, and everywhere else, abstractions of heavy experimental rock where it isn’t always the volume behind them that jars you, but rather the unknown voices that occasionally creak out from within. While each band’s devout nihilism is well known through their music, When No Birds Sang is as if they’ve imagined a place where every souls goes when it’s gone from this Earth. It isn’t heaven and it isn’t Hell. It’s something else outside of all of that which only these two visions could find within themselves.

Highlights: “Rose Tinted World”, “Stars In The Firmament”, “When No Birds Sang”

Full of Hell & Nothing’s When No Birds Sang is available now on Closed Casket Activities.

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