Full of Hell at Vacation Vinyl, Friday, December 9th, 2011 Reviewed
I hadn't noticed that much before, but hardcore can be so theatrical!! As soon as the quartet Full of Hell were done with their madness that was their performance at Vacation Vinyl on Friday night, they seemed so calm and gentle.
But with a name like theirs, what could I expect? When they were playing their heavy mix of hardcore, grindcore, sludge metal, they looked like scary zombies almost in trance, showing the white of their eyes, and playing like sick animals in a total darkness.
The scariest one of all was the singer, he looked like a predator in search of his prey, never resting one second in place, walking back and forth in the small place, yelling with the most raucous howl, as if he had been attacked by a painful weapon, while the drummer was savagely pounding his machine, and the two other guys on guitar and bass were spending most of their time turned toward the amps.
The music was evolving by outbursts separated by calmer moments with doom chords, before the next explosion of a terrible vociferation hardly covered by an avalanche of distortion and a tsunami of fast drums and bass. The whole thing seemed to be only one big growl of some agonizing beast, I mean, they probably have songs, but they didn’t really stop playing between them.
It was the extreme of the extreme, the ugliest of the scariest, and if they describe their furious sound with ‘Numb Your Mind’ on their facebook page, I was thinking that either the singer was getting murdered or he was killing a few people in front of us.
The Maryland quartet, looking all very young, has recently released an album ‘Roots of Earth Are Consuming My Home’, and, as I was reading the funny Bieber’s quote that Vacation Vinyl had displayed at their counter, ‘We're trying to set up a movie for me in the near future. It's going to be similar to the story of how I got discovered. Kinda like my own version of 8 Mile’,
I am pretty sure any Justin Bieber’s fan would have been terrified to death and would have crawled under the next vinyl bins at Full of Hell's first riff,… I think you get what I mean.
