Arson Cafe: Full of Hell & Primitive Man - Suffocating Hallucination Review

Thursday, March 09, 2023

Full of Hell & Primitive Man - Suffocating Hallucination Review

Through different practices of establishing oppressive darkness, it is not unreasonable to consider Primitive Man and Full of Hell were actually churned out of the same furnace. The main distinction is of course the speed of each band's material, the former stomps an overwhelmingly heavy and slow doom metal palette, while the latter skins sound to its extreme with fast paced grindcore. Common ground is found - which is also what distinguishes both from the larger part of the aforementioned genre families - in the excessive use of noise and power electronics.

Once noticing a collaboration album between these two artists, it feels like such an act was just bound to happen eventually, especially among such like-minded individuals. Suffocating Hallucination is characterised by a thick, impenetrable, ugly and intimidating atmosphere, as it is met in the works of both bands.

It is a record that features both their capabilities under the same blanket, yet each respective identity somehow stays intact, and you can be pretty sure of what material was written by which of the two. The vocals also swap between Primitive Man’s growls and Full of Hell’s screaming, but in terms of tempo compromises, most of the record is middle to slow paced with a few distinct faster moments.

The listener gets what was promised with Suffocating Hallucination, as it ticks boxes for: an ultra speedy, 25 second track “Bludgeon” as the stamp of Full of Hell, a dark ambient / noise texture interlude “Dwindling Will”, a painfully decelerated Primitive Man anthem “Trepanation of Future Joys” and the clearest amalgam of the two projects, “Rubble Home”. At the longest piece, the closing “Tunnels to God”, it is the first time we witness these otherwise gruesome bands adopts more melancholic nuances through the fog and the noise, as the song slowly progresses and deconstructs itself.

Such attempts substantiate the inspirational drive behind the creation of Suffocating Hallucination and save the record from being obsolete, as all the pieces are here, hideously refreshed and promptly served on a plate. As a follower of Primitive Man and Full of Hell by now, I see merit in both sides and acknowledge this work, as one of the better collaboration examples lately.

DAMAGE: 3.75/5 [Great]

Release date: 03 Mar 2023

Release label: Closed Casket Activities

Listen: Bandcamp

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Reckoning

From all the hills came screams. A piece of sky beside the crescent sun was detaching. It was a loosened circle of evening sky, suddenly lighted from the back. It was an abrupt black body out of nowhere; it was a flat disk; it was almost over the sun. That is when there were screams. At once this disk of sky slid over the sun like a lid. The sky snapped over the sun like a lens cover. The hatch in the brain slammed. Abruptly it was dark night, on the land and in the sky. In the night sky was a tiny ring of light. The hole where the sun belongs is very small. A thin ring of light marked its place. There was no sound. The eyes dried, the arteries drained, the lungs hushed. There was no world. We were the world’s dead people rotating and orbiting around and around, embedded in the planet’s crust, while the earth rolled down. Our minds were light-years distant, forgetful of almost everything.