There are two Full of Hells. There’s the Full of Hell known for making tightly wound and carefully plotted grindcore on the albums they release under their own name. And there’s the Full of Hell known for their ability to alter their signature sound to the specifications of another band’s music. On their previous collaborative albums, you can hear them scraping and squeezing the aluminum waves of Merzbow, the freeform sludge of the Body, and the doom metal of Primitive Man. The prettiness of Nothing’s dirtbag shoegaze—its haziness, the defeatist riffing, the way the songs move with the oblivious sway of Audrey Horne—isn’t an obvious stylistic match. But on their collaborative album, When No Birds Sang, Nothing’s strolling pace forces Full of Hell to choose their steps carefully, while Full of Hell’s ferocity and ear for detail corrode some of Nothing’s natural beauty. Like all great collaborations, it comes across as the work of a single band and it’s impossible to imagine either group making this record on their own.
If Full of Hell and Nothing sound like they see eye to eye on When No Birds Sang, it could be because they were actually looking at one another. 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 tenderizes even the hardest blows.
When No Birds Sang highlights the depression that’s always lurking within both bands’ heaviness. Opener “Rose Tinted World” is structured 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 compelling vocalists, and when words fail him mid-line, he transitions into a foaming snarl. It’s a brutal opening, with feedback whipping around its edges and a rhythm that could turn granite to powder. But when cheery samples of daytime TV begin to filter in, spilling over one another in their eagerness to insist on the bright happiness of the day—“Miles and miles of sunshine,” gushes one anchor—their chipper attitude recasts the song’s viciousness. Rather than a show of strength, the huge darkness feels dwarfed by the relentlessly empty face of false optimism.
Palermo takes the lead on “Like Stars in the Firmament.” It’s a gauzy slowcore prayer, the ensemble doing just enough to give Palermo the support he needs. “I don’t wanna die,” he sings, his voice soft with tragedy. Rather than throw a cloak of compression over the song to mimic intimacy, producer Will Putney gives the instruments space, allowing DiGristine’s fretless bass to gulp with Palermo as he sings about the flames of hell licking the gates of heaven. Later, in “Spend the Grace,” a scrape of guitar and sigh of feedback cycle around Palermo’s vocal in a sketchy loop, moaning in and out of dissonance and disrupting the angelic tone. It’s the kind of detail Full of Hell would normally gouge into the body of a song; here, their etching deepens the shadows in an already stately sculpture.
When No Birds Sang is the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy. Peer into the distance of “Wild Blue”’s icy grace and see the malfunctioning electronics crackling away. Or listen to the sing-songy chords of “Rose Tinted World”’s coda mimicking the breathiness of a typical Nothing vocal, and how the cascading morning-show samples embody the noise and anger of Walker’s delivery. Functionally, it’s a duet between two of the most distinctive vocalists in metal in which neither opens their mouth: a fitting high point on an album that shows Full of Hell and Nothing pushing one another into new ways of using their voices.
