Coagulated Bliss was written and recorded shortly after the band completed When No Birds Sang, their collaborative album with Nothing. Working with the Philadelphia shoegazers gave Full of Hell new insight into the emotional and artistic power of classic pop songwriting, and to the importance of following a song where it wants to go. “That was a good experience of learning how to find what actually services a song,” Hazard says. “Even with Roots of Earth Are Consuming My Home, even when we’ve had an extreme grindcore influence, I still wanted it to be catchy.” Walker also cites the band’s work with The Body for helping him to “recognize that there was value in pop music.” Accordingly, Coagulated Bliss features some of Full of Hell’s strongest songwriting: Gone is the frenetic flailing of Garden of Burning Apparitions and Weeping Choir; in its stead is a richer, thicker sound, one that’s considerably less ornamented—and somehow heavier than ever.
These songs feel huge, totemic, groundshaking. In “Gelding of Men,” the entire band hammers away at one chord, stomping it into the ground at mid-tempo, blasts of horns helping to push.The numbskull stomp of “Doors to Mental Agony” sets up a circle pit, blasts it apart with a grindcore chorus, then slides away on a slanted riff. In the title track, they bounce back and forth on a thick groove, punctuated with occasional cowbells and scratched up by Walker’s scream, barrel into a pummeling chorus, then jump back out onto the dance floor.
While the focus on songwriting already makes Coagulated Bliss the most grounded album in Full of Hell’s catalog, it’s also the first Full of Hell record that tries in earnest to reflect the world around it—not in some broad, monotony-of-evil way, but the everyday horrors of life in small town America. Three of the four members of the band were raised in Ocean City. Hazard and Bland still live there, while Walker is located in central Pennsylvania and bassist Samuel DiGristine relocated to Philadelphia. “The American dream is small towns,” Hazard says. “But anyone that’s grown up in a small town realizes it’s just as fucked up in a small town as it is in a big city—if not more, because it’s more condensed.”
Blue Vinyl from Closed Casket Activities.