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NILE – “The Underworld Awaits Us All”
NILE – “The Underworld Awaits Us All”
By Thor
South Carolina’s NILE returns with its tenth album of ancient Egypt-themed ultratech-death. Band leader Karl Sanders and longtime drummer George Kollias are in a league of their own, and this album and its fulfilling band members (complete with an extra, third guitar player) are on point once again.
The speed and technical prowess with which this band plies its trade has been at the very highest level since its debut album. Sanders has always assembled elite musicians like he’s Nick Fury trying to save the death metal world. The biggest piece is Kollias who is one of the original wave of truly elite extreme metal drummers, along with former NILE drummer Derrick Roddy and a handful of others.
There’s not much left to say about this band. “The Underworld Awaits Us All”, like the rest of NILE’s catalog, is a collection of jaw droppingly fast, brutal death metal featuring a dual guttural vocal attack, incredible guitar work, the very best drumming you can find on record, and heaps of ominous, dark Egyptology.
If this album has a weakness, it’s arguably the same one the band’s always had. It’s their central conceit, their theme—it’s the Egypt thing. For some reason, that’s never clicked with me. But I’m picking conceptual nits. Musically, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything under the metal paradigm that can touch this. Again, as long as you don’t mind the occasional choral chant and song titles like “Chapter for Not Being Hung Upside Down on a Stake in the Underworld and Made to Eat Feces by the Four Apes”.
NILE’s “The Underworld Awaits Us All” is top-shelf death metal showcasing the genre’s best musicians and exemplary production. Go get it!
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