Band:	Full Of Hell / Primitive Man
Album:	Suffocating Hallucination [Collaboration]
Style:	Dark Ambient, Doom metal, Sludge metal
Release date:	March 03, 2023
A review by:	RaduP

01. Trepanation For Future Joys
02. Rubble Home
03. Bludgeon
04. Dwindling Will
05. Tunnels To God

So Primitive Man now collaborated with Full Of Hell, who collaborated with The Body, who collaborated with Thou, who collaborated with Emma Ruth Rundle, which means a Primitive Man/Emma Ruth Rundle collaboration is not outside the realm of possibility.

It makes a lot of sense that this happened. Full Of Hell is a band that already showed off their collaborative nature before, and I'm pretty sure this exact collaboration was teased before. But I've also seen Full Of Hell's collaborative nature be showcased live during their four sets as artists in residence during 2022's edition of the Roadburn Festival (read all about it). Two of the four would be collaborative sets, one of them a collaboration with shoegaze band Nothing (and one that I'm hoping would be expanded in the studio form too) and one in which Garden Of Burning Apparitions, an album I liked, was performed alongside Spiritual Poison, which is Primitive Man's Ethan Lee McCarthy's noise project. Well, one of them, since he also has the Many Blessings noise project. The man loves his noise.

Now that we established Suffocating Hallucination's background, what do we actually have here? Well, 35 minutes of bludgeoning music more or less. It's no surprise that this is heavy noisy and sludgy. The "biblically accurate" angel on the cover art makes sure that it's immediately obvious that one has a cataclysmic event in audio form as the listening experience. It's massive, it's slow and monotonous, it's all the things you'd expect it to be, but then again you wouldn't need me to tell you that. What was striking though was that each of the five tracks does seem to have a bit of its own personality.

"Trepanation For Future Joys" is the sludge doom dirge, where distorted noise blends with guitar feedback to create a sort of riffless doom that's quite more percussion-lead than anything. "Rubble Home" is more riffy and classical doom oriented, but still drowned in noise and growls. "Bludgeon" is a 25-seconds long grind track, lest one forgets half this collaboration is a grind band. "Dwindling Will" is the dark ambient piece. "Tunnels To God" builds from that ambient towards something more akin to drone metal, than riffy doom that sounds weirdly triumphant and melancholic, then devolving into oppressive noise. And now I spoiled you the entire record, but that should give you some idea about how Suffocating Hallucination utilizes the sound palettes of both its contributing bands.

While most of the sounds on it have been done before quite a lot, there's a balance of brevity and variety that keeps Suffocating Hallucination from feeling too monotonous for its own good, and letting the listening experience the dishearteningly bludgeoning impact it deserves