Review: Full Of Hell and Andrew Nolan – Scraping The Divine
It’s wild that the announcement for Scraping The Divine went a bit under the radar for many, since it’s a collaboration between two artists both at an incredible point in their discographies.
Andrew Nolan has often occupied similar spaces to Full Of Hell throughout his career, with his musical pedigree reaching back to the comparable acidic powerviolence-noise of projects like Column Of Heaven, the glacial, sledgehammer sludge of The Endless Blockade and the gut-punch hardcore of early project, Ebola. His solo material since 2020 has been markedly more eclectic, with albums like 2021’s Lonely Water having leaned towards nocturnal industrial techno and dub in its influences, or the collage-concrète of 2020’s Museum Etiquette. Arguably his most prominent record was last year’s The Hunt, a collaboration with Chicago-based project God Is War, one of 2023’s most underrated records, bridging the gaps between hip hop, power noise and dub, a really fucking wonderful, overlooked record.
Full Of Hell has spent the last few years skirting the edges of various genres, slowly angling towards what would be their newest sound which coalesced into the bizarre, endlessly compelling mathcore-via-arena-rock they developed on Coagulated Bliss earlier this year. Again, like The Hunt, it’s a record that’s among the best releases in its year.
Nolan has contributed to Full Of Hell in the past, most notably on Trumpeting Ecstasy back in 2017—an album I’ve now just realized while typing is almost a decade old. Fuck’s sake.
Scraping The Divine notably doesn’t attempt to continue or expand on either project’s current sound; instead it comes back to a mutually shared heritage in industrial noise and piercing metal. It manages to do that without feeling regressive, however, and there’s a sense of purpose to almost every element of the album.
“Gradual Timeslip” is a really fucking disquieting choice for an opener—distantly reverbed, panning beats paired with stabs of warbled synth. The relative restraint of the instrumentation is counteracted by a greatly uncomfortable guest vocal performance from Endon‘s Taichi Nagura. His complete overwhelming of the vocals of Full Of Hell’s Dylan Walker forces his delivery center stage—these anguished fucking wails that sound much more “real” than a lot of extreme music typically does. Extreme music can be a lot more artifice than art, and it’s easy to bullshit an audience. “Gradual Timeslip” is the sort of track that could probably disquiet one listener and make another laugh; it’s that knife-edge of sincere expression that’s pure chalk-and-cheese. It’s a bold fucking choice for your opener, to say the least.
The song makes the first mention of one of the two major recurring lyrical themes on Scraping The Divine, in this case fire, specifically a funeral pyre. This is again referenced more explicitly on the second track “Heat Death From The Pyre,” connecting the song to the record’s second recurring theme: the sun and cosmos, and by extension, cosmic death. It’s the most densely textured track on the album, mostly owing to the noise from collaborator Guilty Connector, who’s also featured on the later track “Facing The Divide,” a track that sounds like something skittishly banging against a wall in a burning room, trying to look for escape.
“Burdened By Solar Mass” continues to bridge the gap between the album’s themes, with the line “To be so paralyzed at the prospect of drawing another breath / Of seeing another dawn / Only cosmic annihilation makes sense.” It’s a track inviting the sped-up heat death of the universe, and has this break at the mid-point where concrete musical elements fade away, and you’re left with only broken bits of synth, distant, fleeting percussion and airy, hoarse vocals, like the entire track is being subsumed in a vacuum, and only bits of it are managing to pierce through.
“Sphere Of Saturn” features perhaps the most high-profile collaboration on the record, with guitar and vocals from Justin Broadrick of JK Flesh, Godflesh, etc. It’s a much more understated track, the sort you could imagine bolstered with either a pronounced dub influence from Broadrick or a more intense noise injection from Full Of Hell and Nolan. As it is, it feels as if its not quite playing to anyone’s strengths.
“Hemlock Gnosis” features Ryan Bloomer, frequent collaborator with Nolan through the Intensive Care project, who themselves had a split with Full Of Hell back in 2018. It’s a track that sounds like a fusion of death industrial and the dub techno lineage of Nolan’s work with God Is War. As a result it feels like it builds way more on its influences than “Spheres Of Saturn” does, even if it’s sadly a little short. Both “Hemlock Gnosis” and “Blessed Anathema” highlight a true fucking despair better than a lot of “depressive” music manages to, mixing their slower pace with a message of not just personal despondency, but massive, universal anhedonia.
The more measured pace of the album’s mid-point continues through “Facing The Divide,” which is likely aiming to communicate a sort of momentary, detached numbness through its relatively minimal instrumentation that’s sharply broken through with this fizzing, haywire noise. Any ease is shattered by the brief violence of “Approaching The Monolith,” which is the one moment where Scraping The Divine is truly relentless, all the more impactful for the relative pace and restraint in the tracklist up to that point. The only track without lyrics, it feels like a primitive thrashing, like a rabid caveman being given a nailbomb. “Extinguished Glow” feels like respite following this, its squelching acid bass grounding a mid-paced track, almost like a very human moment of shame or remorse after an eruption of anger.
The final three songs form a closing triptych of various shades of industrial metal: from the tense risers and sudden, violent bursts of “Common Miracles,” to the heavy, bass-driven, middle-era Godflesh-worship of “Irradiated Sands,” to the punkish, almost snotty delivery of “Paralytic Lineage.” “Paralytic Lineage” in particular is an off-kilter way to end an album of apocalyptic death industrial, and honestly it put me off on first listen. I didn’t dislike it, I didn’t even think it was demonstrably worse than the rest of the record, I just initially thought it seemed a relatively weak, incongruous way to end such a strong, cohesive record.
But listening through the record again it feels like an oddly cathartic ending, right? Maybe it’s not the most fitting end for an album so intensely dark, but for a record that dealt with massive, existential forces weighing down on you, a record that encapsulates a crushing, cosmic insignificance, it’s striking to have a song that feels like, amidst all that chaos, reclaiming a bit of power, a bit of structure and autonomy almost. It might be an infinitesimally small gesture in the face of everything, but it’s still there, still proof of presence amidst chaos.
There’s a line at the end of True Detective S1 that gets a lot of stick from certain fans online but I think is appropriate, and it’s Rust’s final line: gesturing towards the encompassing blackness of the night sky, decorated sparsely with starlight, he says “Once there was only dark, if you ask me, the light’s winning.”
More than just a mix of two artist’s sounds, Scraping The Divine has a unique sound in both of their respective catalogs. It could have been a middling, half-hearted experiment and it would have been soundly received by fans of both artists; instead it manages to be one of the genuine surprises and highlights of the year.
4/5 Flaming Toilets ov Hell
Scraping The Divine is out now on Closed Casket Activities.
