Nile - The Underworld Awaits Us All (2024)

Country: USA
Style: Brutal/Technical Death Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 23 Aug 2024
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Here's the tenth album for Egyptian metallers Nile and pretty much everything I said about their ninth, Vile Necrotic Rites, holds here, except perhaps for the bits about diverse instrumentation. This is more traditional instrumentally and perhaps that's why it doesn't quite match that album, the unusual string sound on a delightful interlude called The Pentagrammathion of Nephren-Ka notwithstanding and whatever's going on in the coda to Under the Curse of the One God.

The most diverse element this time is vocal, with a whole slew of guest vocalists joining guitarist and lead singer Karl Sanders and the other members of the band who chime in occasionally with a backing vocal. Tellingly, many of these are female, though not from singers known for their work for other bands, and they don't usually sound typical for metal. It would be fairer to say that they sound like they've been borrowed from opera or musical theatre or jazz. A few are male and more expected for epic metal, on songs like True Gods of the Desert.

The unusual female vocals aren't frequent but they're always prominent when they happen and none of them feel like they ought to fit, even if they're all in time with what's unfolding around them. Of course, they do fit, even if the abiding impression is that they're being performed next door in another studio but someone opened an ill advised window so that they bleed through at the precisely perfect time. Then the window is closed again and they're gone.

The first arrives in Overlords of the Black Earth, as if an opera is determined to spring out of that black earth and the band are the titular overlords tasked with performing a ritual to stop it. I'm sure that's not what's happening in the lyrics, even if "we utter the words of power" does rather sound like opera. That returns on Under the Curse of the One God, even if it's just for a couple of lines, while the guitar is warping in fascinating fashion, and on Doctrine of Last Things, the title track and others.

I should call out this warping because it's a fascinating approach, most obviously on Overlords of the Black Earth but also to a lesser degree on a number of other songs. As if their sound wasn't already an intense thing, Nile have bulked up to a trio of guitarists: founder Sanders, plus Brian Kingsland, who was on Vile Necrotic Rites, and one of two new fish this year, Zach Jeter (the other is bassist Dan Vadim Von). I have no idea who's doing this warp guitar thing, but it's a wild and experimental idea that gives the firm impression that the rituals that Nile are performing are opening or closing portals with a quirky and esoteric effect.

Of course, it's still Nile and that means that it's uncompromisingly brutal but also very technical, so that there's never a dull moment. Stelae of Vultures is a powerful opener, but the second track simply erupts out of the gate and I wonder if those should have been swapped around, especially given that the second track is done and dusted in under four blistering minutes while the opener extends out to six and change. It does that appropriately, I should add; it just accordingly fails to have the same impact as the shorter, sharper shock after it.

By the way, I say "second track" so I don't have to keep saying Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes, a title so drawn out it even gets abbreviated in the lyrics. If my favourite songs are the ones with strange vocal additions and unusual effects and codas, like the triple whammy of Overlords of the Black Earth, Under the Curse of the One God and Doctrine of Last Things, I also keep coming back to the second track for the most blistering pace and impact anywhere on the album.

And, of course, along with everything else I said in my Vile Necrotic Rites review that holds true on this one, there's one statement that abides above them all. That's that I'm far less a fan of brutal death metal than I am most other extreme metal genres, but Nile are probably my favourite band to work overtly within that style. My biggest problem with brutal death metal is that much of it is unable to distinguish itself from the rest. Nile are the emphatic exception to that rule. I like this, just not quite as much as its predecessor.

Archspire - Bleed the Future (2021)

Country: Canada
Style: Technical Brutal Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 29 Oct 2021
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Yeah, eagle-eyed readers will realise that I've already reviewed one technical death metal album from Canada that was released on 29th October, 2021 already this week and I'm supposed to mix it up. Well, whatever First Fragment's album was, and it was a heck of a lot of things, it really didn't play for me as death metal. Progressive metal, absolutely. Flamenco metal, sure. Technical in any description, of course. Death metal? Not so much. This, however, is nothing but. Archspire are on their fourth album of brutal death metal that's very fast and very technical and they couldn't be mistaken for anything else.

I haven't heard them before, but I've seen their name popping up all over the place, both over a period of time and in the 2021 end of lists. This album has shown up in five thus far and I'm still in process factoring others in. To highlight the scale of that achievement, only seven albums made it into that many lists and I happily gave Dream Theater, Gojira, Iron Maiden and Mastodon 8/10s. If this follows suit, that only leaves Cannibal Corpse with a 7/10 and Rivers of Nihil still to review. It's also notable that, on two of those lists, at Angry Metal Guy and Metal Observer, it snuck into the top five.

Of all the many bands approaching death metal from a technical or progressive angle, Archspire feel like they're one of the truest to the genre. They aren't spending half the album wandering in other genres. They aren't bringing in sounds from every which where. They're playing death metal and they're playing it incredibly fast and incredibly technically. And I mean that literally because it boggles the mind how fast and technical this gets. Sure, I've heard drummers this fast before and, I'm sure, vocalists this fast. However, Archspire start and stop songs on dimes with such frequency that they have to be insanely tight. This isn't just about keeping time with each other, it's about a need to do that at machine gun speed.

And I should call out Oliver Rae Aleron for special attention here. He doesn't play an instrument in Archspire, he just sings, and that's a tough job to truly live up to. Death growls are limited just in what they are, so it takes a really good vocalist to make them interesting and a special one to sound iconic enough to be either recognisable or invaluable. In my First Fragment review, I made the suggestion that David AB could have not shown up and I wouldn't have noticed. Aleron is such an integral part of Archspire's sound that, not only would they not sound remotely the same with him gone, they would sound notably lesser. He's the textbook for death metal vocals.

And what he does is to keep up with the drums of Spencer Prewett and the guitars of Dean Lamb and Tobi Morelli (and, on songs like Abandon the Linear, the obvious bass of Jared Smith). Which are not slow, trust me. We're beyond thrash metal speed here, into what tends to be reserved for black metal walls of sound, but it's death metal through and through and closer to brutal than it is to melodic. Aleron delivers his vocals in a fascinating way because they're a growl that he spits out as if he was rapping at high speed. Ever heard Rap God by Eminem? Or Godzilla? Aleron surely reaches similar syllables per second delivery speed at points and he's doing it in a growl.

Another fact I should call out here for notice is the fact that Bleed the Future is done and dusted a half hour in. Never mind these technical death metal opuses that bloat to the hour mark and even beyond, with a frequent resultant loss of interest in the listener due to sheer fatigue. This blast of brutal death starts as it means to go, finishes as it started and wraps up in half an hour. Not one of these eight songs reaches five minutes. It's as emphatically in your face as April's Cannibal Corpse album but it does a lot more than just bludgeon. I can tell the songs apart, for a start.

Drone Corpse Aviator, for instance, which kicks off the album, has a notable stop start approach, a cool call and response between voice and guitar and a delightful interlude in the middle that sees a reprise later on. All in four minutes. It's not a clone of anything else here, right down to the solo in the second half, even it carries a similar punch to other tracks here. Even its final moments are memorable. Golden Mouth of Ruin does some similar things, but the riffs and solos are different, the trade offs between instruments are different and nobody attuned to this sort of speed will be mistaking them. Abandon the Linear has some amazing bass runs. And so on and so on.

Favourites? Good question. I love the runs in Abandon the Linear, whether on guitar or bass. The title track is a spat out gem with another delightful drop away from frantic in the midsection and cool guitars taking it home. The rapid fire vocals on Drain of Incarnation are fascinating. And I do get a kick out of the voicemail introducing A.U.M. that asks for danger to be brought back into the music. Well, that's what Archspire do. This is up there with First Fragment, in its way, for technical insanity, but it also feels like a dangerous brutal death metal album. There's the difference.

Nile - Vile Nilotic Rites (2019)

Country: USA
Style: Brutal/Technical Death Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Nov 2019
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In search of something decidedly heavy after the decidedly subdued new Quiet Riot album, here's album number nine from Nile, my very favourite Egyptology-obsessed technical death metal band. I've mentioned a few times how I prefer melodic death to brutal death but I dig Nile a lot. I think it's because the music they play is similar to the manuscripts they turn into lyrics, in that they're an eye catching mystery. I often find myself caught up in the whirl of their songs without much of a clue what's going on but somehow liking the experience anyway.

They're at their best for me when they're furious, which is fortunately most of the time. They slow down a lot on the opener, but the second song is wild and frantic from moment one. Just check out the start of The Oxford Handbook of Savage Genocidal Warfare and buckle in for a frenetic ride. The breakdown a couple of minutes in when they slow down to a crawl but quickly ramp back up to regular speed is absolutely glorious.

I should add that that's not a particularly unusual title for Nile. This is the band who, honest to Ra, released a single called Papyrus Containing the Spell to Preserve Its Possessor Against Attacks from He Who is in the Water. It was pretty damn good too. Maybe we should require them to stick to songs with insane titles because they're usually the best ones. Of course, naming a track Snake Pit Mating Frenzy is an exception to the length rule. How can that possibly be bad? Answer: it can't and its guitar runs are as sinuous and dangerous as they ought to be.

There are other reasons why I like Nile, but a lot of it is the complexity that dominates their songs. They speed up and slow down so much that it's an impossible task to figure out the rhythms. Listen to Seven Horns of War and throw out all your youthful dreams of becoming a drummer. It isn't just that George Kollias can play that fast, it's that he can switch tempos every time you snap your fingers. Sometimes I focus on his drums on Nile albums the way I do Neil Peart's on classic Rush songs.

One of those other reasons is that I like their vocal versatility. While all the singers deliver in a harsh death growl, they do so at different pitches and many songs are really duets that see them pass the vocal back and forth. Add in different styles like what sounds like a satanic choir on That Which is Forbidden and Nile become the textbook on how to deliver in brutal death style without boring us with vocals.

Another is the variety that extends to other aspects of their music.

It's there in the choice of instrumentation. Were those trombones on Seven Horns of War? I know that's a frickin' huge bell on a bunch of tracks. Main man Karl Sanders has been credited before with instruments I've had to look up, such as bağlama; I don't seeing any such credits this time out but the instrumental called Thus Sayeth the Parasites of the Mind is certainly not played on anything you can buy at Walmart. It serves as a fantastic ethnic introduction to the musical haboob, Where is the Wrathful Sky, which has an array of middle Eastern instrumentation under its guitar riff.

It's also in knowing how long the songs should be. The eleven on offer here range from just over a minute and a half to close to nine. Those in between vary wildly because none of them are interested in outstaying their welcome. If a song's done in two minutes, then it's done. If it needs eight to do its thing, then it'll have eight. That one's The Imperishable Stars are Sickened and it's the slowest and heaviest song on the album.

And, of course, they kick ass. I usually turn to thrash metal when I need to clean out my system, but Nile fit that need too. Snake Pit Mating Frenzy or Where is the Wrathful Sky would play well after anything from Reign in Blood for a double bill guaranteed to curbstomp your previous mood. Then throw on The Imperishable Stars are Sickened and you'll forget who you are. I'll visit you in the asylum.

It's been a few years since I've seen Nile live but they're touring again to support this album and I should get them firmly onto the calendar. They're already my favourite brutal death metal band and they keep on delivering of late. This is the best album they've done in quite a while.