Full of Hell and Nothing - When No Birds Sang (Clear with White Gold and Royal Splatter Vinyl)

"On When No Birds Sang, Nothing and Full Of Hell meet in the perfect middle. The result is as colossal and evocative as Deafheaven’s Sunbather while also proving there’s more than one way to combine shoegaze and extreme metal. The album feels split up into acts or movements (the vinyl lists side A as North and side B as South), a division encapsulated by the triptych on the cover, depicting a cloud in a blue sky. The six songs range from four to eight minutes, a world of flux contained within each. The patient flow of the music lends it a classical texture; the record plays like a sweeping, sinister symphony, with the focus placed on the mood and atmosphere above all else. “Forever Well” is pushed forward by floating synthesizers like wisps of smoke, before, two-thirds of the way through, it explodes into a wall of Walker’s growls harmonized with emotive exhales from Palermo and Martin. On “Wild Blue,” the ethereal sonic palette never ignites into ruthless metal; it remains ambient, an unexpected move from both groups. Together, they are unrecognizable, forming a whole new beast, ferocious and fascinating.

The album is loosely based on The Falling Man, the famous Richard Drew photograph of a man plummeting from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Because of the angle, his body, suspended upside down, is aligned with the edge where the North and South Towers meet, a bizarrely perfect geometry. One of the most disturbing aspects of the piece is the straightness of his figure, the lack of visible struggle, the silent acceptance of violently falling to one’s death. “You could always hear them hitting the ground, like a sack of cement, a big thud,” Drew said about the people jumping from the buildings. “In some ways, it might just be the last element of control that you have,” Jack Gentul said about his late wife Alayne in the Falling Man documentary. “Everything around you is happening and you can’t stop it, but this is something that you can do. And to be out of the smoke and the heat, and to be out in the air, it must have felt like flying.”" - Stereogum