Album Review : Primitive Man & Full of Hell - Suffocating Hallucination (2023)
A band not having any standout song is usually a bad thing. If I buy tickets to Mayhem and not another black metal band, it's because I want to hear Deathcrush, Freezing Moon and all the other hits. So many bands have a well-defined sound, but no songs to properly speak of. But sometimes the sound is the entire fucking point. Bands like Primitive Man and Full of Hell aren't in the music business to write hits. They’re in the game to express something unbound by time and user friendliness constraints.
Earlier this year, they joined forces on a memorable collaborative record called Suffocating Hallucination and did just that.
This is not a split. Full of Hell have worked on several collaborative records prior to Suffocating Hallucination, namely with bands like Whitehorse, The Body and Japanese noise icon Merzbow. They have developed a real ear for working within their collaborator’s sonic paradigm and this is perhaps their most attuned release yet. Suffocating Hallucination sounds very much like a Primitive Man record where Full of Hell would’ve broken into their studio and tinkered with the recordings at night.
The opener Trepanation for Future Joys is a creeping, feedback driven duet between Primitive Man’s Ethan Lee McCarthy and Full of Hell’s Dylan Walker, shrouded in heavy, monolithic guitar and shambolic drums. The bass is also super loud in the mix and has such a gnarly tone, it makes the song carry so much more weight. Trepanation for Future Joys is a study in sound more than it is a composition to properly speak of and I mean that in the best possible way. It's designed to hurt, but the pain it delivers is exquisite.
Also, props to whoever came up with the drum outro. It added another, different layer of pounding to an already crushing song. I know it all sounds like fucking joyless music and to a certain extent it is, but listening to Suffocating Hallucination (as all of Primitive Man’s releases) triggers a very specific kind of catharsis. One that you can only understand if you’ve been chastised for being different. Where your emotions become so nasty and intense, they wash over your like a tidal wave. It feels liberating to hear someone else feel it.
Rubble Home starts with a similar, quiet dissonant intro, but this time it slowly recedes between a creeping wall of distortion and pounding drums that unlocks a groove not unlike those you can find on EyeHateGod records. The fundamental different between the two being that Primitive Man and Full of Hell don’t have any of the nihilistic abandon of the New Orleans legends. They very much give a shit and you can hear it in the dramatic sensibility of the song. Shambolic grooves are not a new idea, but they gave it a new life.
About halfway in, the song explodes in a freewheeling, jazzy Full of Hell signature onslaught driven by Dave Bland’s chaotic drumming before crumbling under its own weight again. The difference in both band’s sounds and how well they complement one another is easier to appreciate in Rubble Home than on Trepanation for Future Joys. It has this competitive, push-and-pull dynamic that mirrors' one's self-destructive interior struggle. The sound is as thick and impenetrable, but it hurts in a different way.
Suffocating Hallucination takes somewhat of a left turn after Rubble Home. Bludgeon is a thirty seconds grindcore/powerviolence song hiding behind a wall of chaotic noise. It feels mostly like a Full of Hell song, but it’s the only one on the record that does. Dwindling Will is a slow burning, six and a half minutes dark ambient/noise track that mixes cristalline textures, distant, otherworldly voices and cavernous noises. It’s a lot quieter than the rest of the record, but it's a pressure cooker of a song that tells a story in its own right.
Dwindling Will is one of my favorite songs on Suffocating Hallucination. It serves as a transition to the explosive finale Tunnels to God and a shift to another state of consciousness. It prepares you to ascent from misery into an all-powerful anger. In fact, both songs are indistinguishable from one another as the end of Dwindling Will is the beginning of Tunnels to God. The eleven minutes juggernaut is eerily quiet for the first two minutes until the Dave Bland’s freejazzing drum pierces through a thick wall of reverb.
The monolithic power of Primitive Man slowly rises form the primordial ether through a thick, swamp monster of a bass riff and a tremolo picking guitar that feels completely appropriate in this context. You all know how much I think tremolo picking is abused in extreme music, but it feels at home in such an off beat, belligerent song. McCarthy and Walker deliver a memorable performance together as vengeful deities who both suffer and inflict suffering. It's a song that eludes classification. You have to hear it to believe it.
*
Neither Primitive Man nor Full of Hell are bands you can "try to get into". You either get it or you don't. First time I heard Primitive Man, I was like : "Oh yeah. That guy understands everything" and I was a fan from then on. Suffocating Hallucination feels more like a Primitive Man record because Full of Hell is such an amorphous, shapeshifting beast, but they do add an unpredictable dimension to Primitive Man’s bulldozing sound. Suffocating Hallucination is full of weight and pain and it's pretty fucking awesome.
